Cooking

In Houdini, recomputing the look and contents of the scene when the underlying network changes is called cooking the scene.

Cooking is the process of driving information through the networks, from the outputs of operators to the inputs of operators to which they are wired, to create and animate the scene.

Cooking shows the results of changes you make. If you have a very complex scene, cooking can take a noticeable amount of time, disrupting the flow of interactive changes. In that case, you may want to set the cook state to On mouse up or Manual to prevent interactive cooking. (See below.)

Cancel cooking

Cancels the current update. Use this if you accidentally changed a setting that caused a very long recook and you want to cancel.

Manual cook

Manually cooks the scene when the recook menu is set to Manual.

Recook menu

The value of this pop-up menu controls when/how often Houdini recooks the scene and updates the display.

Auto Update

The default. Recook the network and update the display continuously as you make changes to the UI. This is the best way to work, but for extremely complex scenes it may become slow and unresponsive.

On mouse up

Only recook the network and update the display when you finish changing a control.

For example, in Auto Update mode, the display will update continuously as you move a slider. In On mouse up mode, the display will only update when you release the slider.

Manual

Only recook the network and update the display when you manually click the Manual cook button.

Continuous parameter updates

Click this button to turn on continuous updates of parameter values in the parameter editor when you change the UI or playback animation.

Normally the values in the parameter editor do not update continuously for performance reasons. However, it can be very useful to see the values change as the animation plays or as you interactively change another parameter.