Using the environment variables in the Houdini docs added to my houdini.env, I am getting errors when looking for the AlembicProcPrim.dll to render .abcs using renderman 20.

I have;

RMANTREE = CProgram Files/Pixar/RenderManProServer-20.4
PATH = $RMANTREE/bin

And the path to the required alembic DSO in the rib file is expanding to;

CProgram Files/Pixar/RenderManProServer-20.4etcAlembicProcPrim.dll

If I use forward slashes in my .env file as Pixar reccomends, the procedural is found, but RMANTREE doesn't work.

Is this an escape character issue? They break my brain on windows….

If I use forward slashes in my .env file as Pixar reccomends, the procedural is found, but RMANTREE doesn't work.

Since forward slashes work, then indeed it looks like an escape character issue. Try preceding the backslashes with another backslash.

Also note that houdini.env file is meant for variables recognized by Houdini (eg, HOUDINI_VIEW_RMAN and RMANTREE). But the PATH env variable is meant for the system to find exectuables, so it should be set outside of .env file:
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000549.htm [computerhope.com]

Hey rafal. Sorry for the delay answering your reply. Got caught up with working on another task.

I tried double backslashes to no avail, also tried removing any PATH entires relating to Prman in the houdini.env

Is something that could be solved using SOHO hooks? I had a quick look into the RIB.py and RIBgeo.py, it's fairly dense stuff, not 100% sure if it's overkill for the task.

Cheers,
Aaron.

You could try troubleshooting it in SOHO. If you go to RIBsohogeo.py and put some print statements in getAlembicProc(), you can analyze the construction of the final path.

In theory you could fix it by setting AlembicProcedural to your own function, but it's better to figure out the real source of the problem.