Does anyone know if there is a way to feed the Help Browser in Houdini 18 a CSS file to hack a dark mode? I love using this resource within the UI, but the white background is a little blinding at night.

Thanks!
Travis

This is what you are looking for:
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/54423/#post-262851 [www.sidefx.com]

You can actually copy all of the
to
Then you can tweak the CSS here, for better housekeeping.

I sent an RFE a long time ago, with an idea similar to the Youtube's dark mode switch. I expected it not later than H18 at least here in the online docs, but still not enough effort on UI/UX (despite Solaris > Lookdev/lighting artists are more photosensitive)
I guess it would take an hour or so for an expert to create a sun/moon CSS switch on the top bar (like Youtube, Reddit, Twitter, Google Help, Blender community etc. ). This is so ADSK-ish, I'd expect more responsibility from SideFX

Using Chrome we don't need to wait for web developers, there is an experimental feature which can be set on the flags page:
chrome://flags/
Force Dark Mode for Web Contents
Automatically render all web contents using a dark theme. – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android
#enable-force-dark

Enabled with selective inversion of non-image elements seems a good compromise.

Then the magic happens, all the web pages render eye-friendly.

It works like a charm by now… Useful even for this forum and those late night work sessions. Thanks!

The forum itself has a ton of dark themes if you are logged in (profile menu/settings/forum).

As much as I avoid his OS, the tweets by Bill Gates are quite useful things, this is his actual book recommendation:

i love that you posted in a dark mode request thread with an unnecessarily huge and mostly white image

but yeah, i'd second that help window dark mode ask. everything should be dark mode by default now anyway, right?!

If there is night, the charming linen alerts you: the most healthy dark mode is the eyelids closed & sleep mode

When few years back I started to migrate away from Maya and checked how's going the UI stuff in Houdini and opened the help: that's great, the help is also dark by default, a step up in ergonomics… then clicked, and all the other pages were - and still are - superwhite. I really wonder why the front page of the help is dark for years, but the others didn't made it.
So yes, they should get the same scheme.

xilofoton, thanks for the the reply and all the info around this. I messed around with the css, but quickly decided that as another project it needs to get in line behind all the rest. I may have to wait for SFX to implement this natively. I am using the DarkReader plugin for FireFox which is great for turning every website dark.. it's a temporary fix.

I've read ‘Why We Sleep’. Great book! I've been recommending it to all my friends. Get yourself an Oura Ring if you don't have one already. It's enabled me to pinpoint what promotes and detracts from my sleep cycles. In a nutshell:

Deep sleep is hindered by:
- eating late (4 or less hours before sleep)
- working out too hard 4 or less hours before sleep

REM is hindered by:
- bright lighting (especially blue spectrum) after sundown and especially screen time before bed
- any drug that tends to be used for sleep including weed. As per the book they act as sedatives and hinder your sleep cycle.

If you ever need to take anything, my favorite by far is Rest-zzz by LifeSeasons


I love that these kind of conversations happen on the Houdini Forum. It's a testament to how intelligent their user-base is

travisrogers
I love that these kind of conversations happen on the Houdini Forum. It's a testament to how intelligent their user-base
is

Are we really intelligent enough?
Is it ok that most of Houdini users's work end up in the mass consumption of Happy Meal menus + figures? (Which end up in the oceans…)
Yes it's a generalization, but I hope you know what I mean. I really mean this after Star Wars Day.
Instead of producing content which are more useful for the society in long terms, we mostly use these very complex tools to feed escapism. I think in these times we should rethink our “duty”, others already did:

Inside the VFX of Cosmos: Possible Worlds
An interactive Webcast – Inside the VFX of National Geographic’s Cosmos: Possible Worlds – with award-winning Visual Effects Supervisor Jeffrey A. Okun, VES.

Okun, who had young dreams of becoming an astronaut, takes us inside his 18-month journey supervising visual effects on this season’s 13 episodes of Cosmos, the widely successful science documentary TV series, hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Here I gathered some inspiring examples regarding the actual situation, mostly scientific visualizations:
https://scivfx.wordpress.com/coviz/ [scivfx.wordpress.com]

Recently Chris “TED” Anderson did a webinar with Matt Walker:
Why sleep matters now more than ever | Matt Walker [www.youtube.com]