Hi there, I'm a pretty new user to Houdini, so apologies if I'm being a bit slow on the up-take.
First of all, I'm curious to hear what workflows people are using alongide the take-list. What pro's and con's have you found in a production environment especially when multiple users might use a scene.
Some ideas I had that I thought might improve the functionality of takes and the take-list :
Allow editing of values set in the take-list. Currently these appear to be read-only.
Add a button that would bring the network/parameter panel focus to the parameter selected. This would allow the take-list to become a on-the-fly bookmark list of parameters that you are testing/editing.
The problem with takes is that they are not that procedural workflow friendly although you can it is not ideal and therefore are used little (in my experience) so i can only talk about how I use them.
I use takes mostly to do override of parameters for animation variations and testing options when I send to the farm things and not much more.
There have been cases in which I had to maintain a parallel configuration of the scene and it's object parameters and therefore in that case it has been very useful so it's a very personal thing.
You can use them to store rendering parameters, for example you can make high quality and low quality takes: in the first you'll put like 6 pixels sample and in the low quality you can put just 1 or 2,this kind of stuff…
So while you are in lookdev you keep the low quality, one you are ready to render instead of re-set the mandra node you just switch to High quality and hit render.
Takes are not ideal in a shot lighting department as they are anything but portable out of the box. Bundles are a good idea but again not procedural and its impossible to deploy them across a shot lighting dept with out rolling your own version in python.
