Truely Awesome,

But is there a way to disable the popup that ensues each time you
try to overwrite some output? I wrap this node and would prefer to
be able to opt in or out of that popup requiring confirmation given
some top level control.

ie “An Existing File cache has been detected. Erase and Replace”

You could launch the render using python. This would avoid the popup message I guess, or add the popup infos you need.

something like:


hou.node(“/obj/your_node”).parm(“your_render_button”).pressButton()


or:

hou.node(“/obj/your_render_node”).render()

You can call it from a button's callback in your top level controls UI.

Thanks, but I'm not asking how to invoke a render. I'm asking if there is a way to suppress the confirmation dialog that appears after the render in background button is pressed on the geometry rop (programmatically or otherwise) should the destination cache exist. The logic triggering this is buried somewhere, just not sure if it's accessible or can be bypassed. I'm wondering if there is an environment variable or node specific configuration that can be set to do this. I'm pretty sure this node is a binary and I can't hack it.

Ah yes you're right, even using python there is this popup … I can't find any env variable about that … that would be very interesting to have sidefx's input on that !

I'd recommend using the python approach. In that script, before you trigger the background render, pre-delete all the files.

I'm very reluctant to add the “always delete” option to that popup. It just seems so potentially catastrophic to lose a seven day sim with a random mis-click. But I do understand the annoyance of an extra popup everytime you want to re-sim!

Thanks for the reply on this micro point Jeff.

I'm not opposed to the popup check for the cache, our studios geometry cacher has always done that. This additional popup now gets in the way. Deleting the cache before the query to delete the cache in order to avoid the query to delete the cache is a bit of a logic loop. I don't want to delete the cache at all as that can take a lot of needless time when you just want the confirmation if it's OK to overwrite.

Afaict this popup was added in 15, it only appears with a frame range render and you don't get it unless you press the save to disk in background button (no popup when there's an existing cache for a straightforward render call)

Kind of weird to encounter this, but if it can't be turned off I suppose I can defer my own cache check for this one. Our cacher can set a mode to opt out of being asked this all the time which I'd loose (useful when you have to bake a lot of caches) not to mention I can't get a return value from this internal popup if I wanted to handle this specific question and or others.

It'd be awesome to see the render in background function supported in scripting/soho. So you could call a function and pass it the level of verbosity desired, number of threads, etc.

This can be done with some hbatch/hython manipulation but if done that way it won't show up in the render scheduler.