I'm using $HIP in paths in Houdini - to output renders, and to point at intial states. It has suddenly stopped working. When I open the file browser, at the top, in red, is the path that is typed in the text field in the main UI, except that the “$HIP…” at the beginning is repalced with “$HIP/$HIP/…”

This is a rel showstopper for me at this point. I need to use $HIP because I'm using HQueue on a network.

Anyone have a work-around?

Hi $HIP is a global variable and evaluates to your hip file location ie

$HIP = Cmyprojects/thisproject/

For rendering you would use something like this $HIP/render/blah_frame_$F4.exr . Which evaluates to Cmyprojects/thisproject/render/blah_frame_$F4.exr . You should not have two $HIP variables in your path.

Rob

I guess I didn't explain the problem clearly. I am not putting $HIP in my file paths twice. That would be silly. Houdini seems to be doing it on it's own. I think it's a bug.

I saw one other thread where someone else was experiencing the same issue. Check out the third post in this thred. He says he's seeing a “a double path”. I'm having the same issue:

http://forums.odforce.net/topic/22196-hqueue-is-getting-annoying/ [forums.odforce.net]

Here is a screen grab. On the right is the path I want to use. Note the bright red text. That floating window is what I see when I open the file dialog to the right of the “Geometry File” text field.

What sort of file path is $HIP/../sim/ etc etc you should be using

$HIP/sim/blah blah if you are trying to read the sim file directory which is in the same folder directory as your hip file.

Rob

Definitely seems like a bug, I can repro it if I try to read a path that starts with $HIP/.. and with $JOB it shows something different (see attachment) bug equally funky.

Is there a reason you can't keep your hip file in a place to avoid needing to go up a directory? Or maybe use $JOB/sim/filename.$F.bgeo.sc? (*edit* as circusmonkey suggests!)

Have you already submitted the bug?

I have not submitted the bug. I don't know how to do that. Do you think it's the moving up a dir (“../”) that's causing the problem? I can avoid that - no biggy there. I'm just glad to know I'm not going crazy!

Are you on windows ? If so its never worked for me it drove me to change the way I work with folder structures.

rob

Yes, we are on Windows for this project. I am waiting on a linux machine I ordered for home. Bye bye Windows (mostly)!

I think I will also adjust my folder structure and see if that fixes the problem.

Apparently I was doing it wrong. I haven't tried it the right way yet, but someone from SESI replied to my question about this. They said that in Houdini “../” means “up one directory from $HIP”, so

$HIP/../

yields $HIP/$HIP/../

I hope that helps anyone else facing this situation.

darkczar
(…) someone from SESI replied to my question about this. They said that in Houdini “../” means “up one directory from $HIP”

That's very good to know, cheers

it is definitely a bug
I used to use $HIP/../../../xxx all the time several versions ago for small setups where I haven't established $JOB and it always worked well, houdini never expanded it to anything visually, but it worked

now it get the same weirdly expanded $HIP/$HIP/../ (even on Linux)
which is not the same
$HIP/../ does not equal $HIP/$HIP/../
it's simply being expanded wrong instead of being just resolved correctly without changing relative path written by user

luckily it still works in path parms, just the file browser messes things up when opened

Are you guys using recent cuts? I recall we fixed a $HIP path issue in 14.0.209 - not sure if it's the same one you're hitting or not but it looks similar.

chrism
Are you guys using recent cuts? I recall we fixed a $HIP path issue in 14.0.209 - not sure if it's the same one you're hitting or not but it looks similar.

haven't tried the latest, but I'm still experiencing it on 14.0.272 linux-x86_64_gcc4.6

EDIT: seems like fix in 14.0.209 was about content of $HIP value, but this problem is more about some magical path expansion when using /../ in the file browser
it is not related only to variables

if you open file browser and type:
/tmp/../
it will get expanded to
/tmp/.//tmp/../

the longer the prepending path, the worse it gets
/tmp/backup/../
expands to
/tmp/backup//tmp/backup/../

in path it used not to expand it at all, just kept at
/tmp/../
which is important in case of variables
$HIP/../
should stay written as
$HIP/../
but evaluate to parent folder of $HIP and continue from there

it does that while in path parameters, but not in filebrowser

darkczar
I have not submitted the bug. I don't know how to do that.

No worries - there's a forum message stickied right near the top of this forum called ‘How to log bugs and rfe’s for Houdini' that tells you all about it.

I just logged BUG: 67897 for ya.

Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Houdini 14.0.290: Fixed bug with the file choosers incorrectly expanding paths with embedded “/../” strings.

this was super fast, amazing support, thanks SESI