Basics Configure Houdini

How to configure Houdini to match your project and workflow.

Overview

Choose a category from the Edit > Preferences submenu to open the main preferences window.

See also how to change the hotkeys and how to customize the shelf.

Common UI customizations

You can customize the UI for a particular workflow, project, or facility.

To... Do this

Scale the Houdini UI

Choose Edit > Preferences > General user interface and change the Global UI size option.

You can also set the HOUDINI_UISCALE as an environment variable to access a full range of scaling values as a percentage of the normal size (default is 100).

Adjust the UI colors

Choose Edit > Color settings.

Use Houdini 8-style pane coloring to show network type

Choose Edit > Preferences > General user interface and turn on Color pane headers with network contexts.

Add preset colors to palette in the color picker dialog

  1. Use the color sliders to choose the color you want.

  2. Alt-click in the palette area (in the top right corner) to add the current color there.

    The color definition is saved in $HOME/houdiniX.Y/.palette (where X.Y is the version number of Houdini) so it persists between Houdini sessions.

    The only way to remove a color after you've added it is to edit the .palette file.

Common viewer customizations

To... Do this

Change the tumbling behavior

  1. Choose Edit > Preferences > 3D Viewports.

  2. Click a tumbling method. The default is 80s-style Euler tumbling, which doesn’t let you tilt the horizon or go upside-down by tumbling (you can still tilt using special keys, see the section on viewing).

Turn off multicolored handles

With this option off, Houdini will draw handles all-red instead of coloring the axes red, green, and blue.

  1. Choose Edit > Preferences > Handles.

  2. Turn off Color transform handles by axis.

Use a black background in the 3D viewer

  1. Click the viewport options menu and choose Display > Display Options or press D to open the Display Options window.

  2. Click the Background tab.

  3. Set the Color Scheme pop-up menu to Dark.

Change the background color in a compositing viewer

  1. In a compositing viewer pane, open the right side toolbar and click Display Options or press D to open the Display Options window.

  2. Click the Background tab.

  3. Click the color swatch to choose a color.

Common network editor customizations

To... Do this

Choose whether to zoom in and out from the center or based on the mouse position

  1. Choose Edit > Preferences > Network Editor, Nodes and Trees.

  2. Turn Center zoom on mouse on or off.

Change how wires are drawn

  1. In the network editor, press D to open the display options.

  2. On the Network View/Display tab, set the Link style option.

Automatically place new nodes instead of requiring a click

  1. Choose Edit > Preferences > Network Editor, Nodes and Trees.

  2. Turn on Place new tiles immediately.

Paths and locations

Houdini uses two types of environment variables for specifying directories: paths (lists of locations to check for files), and locations (paths of directories).

In a command line shell, run hconfig -ap to show the current path and location assignments, and instructions and shortcuts for setting the variables.

Locations

Locations, like $HSITE (directory of site-specific files) and $HIP (the directory containing the current .hip file), specify the directory in which to find files for various purposes.

Unlike a path, a location variable can’t have multiple directories; it’s simply used to avoid hard-coding locations, as in $HFS/geo/model.bgeo instead of /usr/joe/files/show/act1/scene1/geo/model.geo. This makes the .hip file much more portable between machines and operating systems.

Tip

You can set the $HSITE variable to a directory containing site-specific files. You can set the $JOB variable to a directory containing project-specific files. The two locations are included in the path, but not defined by default. So, if you define one or both, they will already be included in the path.

Note

The $HSITE directory must contain a houdinix.y directory (such as houdini9.0). If no such directory exists, Houdini will not search in $HSITE.

Paths

Paths, like $HOUDINI_PATH, can have more than one location, and Houdini searches the locations in the path in the order they appear in the variable.

Houdini uses paths to search for various file types (for example, $HOUDINI_GEOMETRY_PATH for .geo files) when the file’s location is not absolute.

For example, the default $HOUDINI_GEOMETRY_PATH is:

./
$HOUDINI_PATH/geo/

If you add a location to the path:

./
$HIP/geo/
$HOUDINI_PATH/geo/

…then you can just use model.bgeo in a geometry file parameter and Houdini will find it if it exists in $HIP/geo/.

Some important Houdini paths:

$HOUDINI_GEOMETRY_PATH

Geometry (.geo) files.

$HOUDINI_OTL_PATH

Operator type library (.otl) files.

$HOUDINI_SCRIPT_PATH

HScript (.cmd) files.

$HOUDINI_TEXTURE_PATH

Image files.

$HOUDINI_CLIP_PATH

Channel and audio files.

$HOUDINI_VEX_PATH

Compiled VEX (.vex) files.

This not a full list of search paths. In a command shell, run hconfig -ap to see all available path variables.

See also

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