Hi all.
I am using $HIP variable as my project root directory.
Now I have change my project to a soft linked directory in my system.
The problem is that Houdini sets the $HIP variable to the original directory, not the linked directory.
For example I have the directory:
/media/data/projects/logos
Then I made a softlink
/projects -> /media/data/projects
I open scenes contained in:
/projects/logos
But $HIP variable is set to:
/media/data/projects/logos

Is there any way to solve this?
Thanks

Even more I have just realized that if I try to put my soft linked directory in the $HOME/houdini8.1/jump.pref, this directory doesn't appear in the open dialog file.
It only occurs with soft linked directories

Hey lisux,

Don't use $HIP, Houdini will want to set this to the dir where you started houdini, and it's going to change on you all the time.

Instead, use $JOB. There's even an hscript command “job” which helps you set this variable. As a rule, you should set $JOB to some dir at the “top” of where you are going to work, and then in front of every file reference use $JOB. That will then make your hipfile portable, should you want to move things later (or render on some other machine).

If you set $JOB to the name of the symbolic link, then you can use the “soft” name and it will work as you want.

For example (in unix)

cd /tmp
mkdir realdir
ln -s realdir softFakeName
cd /tmp/softFakeName
houdini
(set job to be /tmp/softFakeName, then save your hip file and exit)

then start up houdini again load that hipfile and check out $JOB. You'll see it's set to /tmp/softFakeName and all $JOB references will work thusly. I hope that helps.

cheers,
ben.

Hi ben.
Thanks.
Now I am moving my old HIP centralized work to a JOB centralized pipeline.
But I have found a problem
I want to use the HSITE variable to put some common site scrips for all the people, DSOs, etc …
It works fine except that whean I define the HSITE variable I can't open the help browser, I always get a blank browser page with the next message
chrome/houdini/locale/home.html
Another errors I get when trying to opening existing scenes are:
Could not find template file: Templates/GenV3/subdialog.top
Could not find template file: Templates/GenV3/spareparm.initial
Unable to resolve template file: ‘Templates/GenV3/subdialog.mid’
Could not find template file: Templates/GenV3/spareparm.final
Unable to resolve template file: ‘Templates/GenV3/subdialog.bot’


Why I get these weird errors when I set the HSITE variable?
The HSITE variable is corrects because I can source some scritps I have put there.
Thanks

Finally I catch the problem.
The problem was in one script that I called from the HSITE located files.
Is not a problem of the HSITE variable itself.
This problematic script, by error, reset the HFS variable to an incorrect plave and this causes all the errors.

Hi there,

Just so you're aware of it, there are the “FS” classes in the HDK; FS_ReaderHelper, etc - for which there is a sample under $HFS/toolkit/samples.

This is useful for remapping filenames invisibly inside of Houdini. At DD our network relies on some symbolic links to manage the distributed disk space and, yup, the names keep mapping to ugly resolved path (as UNIX is wont to do). So we wrote the tiniest HDK plugin to detect these ugly names and replace them with good names internally in Houdini on the fly. This saves us a lot of messing around in other areas.

Some Doxygen docs around here:
http://www.odforce.net/hdk/tree/H8.0/toolkit/html/classFS__ReaderHelper.html [odforce.net]