So, I've taken the plunge in trying to learn the HDK, and the UI is just a pain to describe, so then I find the TemplateBuilder and its .ds file, and that seems to be just lovely and makes looks alot easier to get a UI up and running, but…I cannot find the .ds file spec anywhere?

Does anyone know where the .ds file spec is, so I can understand how to describe the UI to the TemplateBuilder?

Thanks.

Hi Daryl,

There doesn't appear to be a defacto spec written down anywhere I can find, hopefully there'll be some soon! The best sources for this information at present appear to be the wonderful SOP_WindingNumber project in the $HFS/toolkit/samples/SOP folder.

The DS file starts on line 390 of SOP_WindingNumber.C and includes examples of many parameter types, the other place to look is possibly $HFS/houdini/python2.7libs/generate_proto.py which actually parses the .ds file - the dsparm() function at line 1487 is worth a gander at.

Not the cleanest set of docs on the topic, but make for interesting reading anyway. Hope that's useful

Cheers,
Henry

Hello all,

I was just looking at this, and I found the easiest way was to generate a ui for a hda using the houdini gui to do so. Once I was happy with the UI, I saved the hda in unpacked form (http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/assets/textfiles.html) insidethe folder you will find a “DialogScript” file. From here you can copy and paste your entire UI ( I just left out the first few lines).

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Koen

Ah! Thanks Koen,

I had a feeling there was something like this lurking around. Unfortunately, I believe it's an option only available to those with a full commercial license.

Would still be great to have the spec written out somewhere for reference

Thanks for the help guys, but, using the GUI editor is about the same level of effort as manually coding out the GUI Templates for the HDK.

What I like about the .ds string, is that its plain English text and, IF I had a a spec for it, I can generate the .ds string from my 3rd party library API data layout.