HOM rpc

You can control Houdini remotely by accessing HOM through an XML-RPC (remote procedure call) interface over the network. Python provides a built-in XML-RPC client, so you can control a remote copy of Houdini from a Python script.

To start Houdini’s RPC server, type the following in Houdini’s Python shell.

import houxmlrpc
houxmlrpc.run(port=8888)

The RPC server will run in a separate thread, waiting for RPC calls from other processes.

Now you can remotely control Houdini from another process (or on another computer). For example, in Python, to access the hou module of a copy of Houdini running locally on port 8888:

rpc_server = houxmlrpc.ServerProxy('http://localhost:8888')
hou = rpc_server.hou