Organization and optimization

How to use bundles, takes, and other features to organize and experiment with your scene.

The most powerful method for organizing and re-using your work in Houdini is digital assets. Digital assets let you bundle up a network of nodes, such as a character or an effect, as well as any supporting resources such as scripts and textures, and make it its own self-contained node with parameters and handles. This is a very effective way for technical directors to create resources and disseminate them to artists.

Takes let you organize explorations, variations, and different passes. You start with a baseline setup, and then layer on a hierarchy of takes, where each take is a set of changes to various parameters on objects and nodes in the scene.

For advanced users, learn how to optimize Houdini for faster cooking and viewing.

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Cooking

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

Create variations with takes

Speed up your scene

Bundles

Bundles allow you to refer to a group of objects as a single unit. This is useful in situations such as lighting where you can link a bundle of lights all at once.