Has someone managed to install pip and use external packages with Python that ships with Houdini (on Windows)?
Alternatively, is it possible to tell Houdini to use other Python installation as long as it's of the same version, or is it the version used by Houdini some custom build?

Does this help in any way?

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.0/hom/locations#disk [sidefx.com]

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.0/hom/cb/wxpython [sidefx.com]

Thanks.

After reading the first link that you provided I decided to clean up my system a bit from various installations of Python, and leave only the one that comes with Houdini. After modifying Windows environment paths to point to this single Python instance only, I launched shell with admin privileges and installed pip without any problems. It was that simple. ops:

But you will just be able to install pure python packages. For packages with c/cpp dependencies you would have to configure a visual cpp compiler for your pip environment, which fails in 99% of all cases. The easiest way is to switch linux or maybe use 2 interpreters with execnet
http://codespeak.net/execnet/example/hybridpython.html [codespeak.net]