Just try to keep track of all the otls and scripts here. Since there is more than one H workstation, it can become a big miess pretty quickly if one stores these files locally. And since I stored scripts in the beginning in the default shelf, well, another big mess after 3 versions of H. : )

I wonder what's the best way to avoid double versions or differently altered scripts/nodes. In my mind it's to store them all on a NAS and Houdini needs to read it from there on every start up. But what about if somebody alters these files during the day? If I save otls they would need to get saved to the main server and not to the local Houdini folder inside of documents, right?

But since each workstation might need local preferences it can't be stored all in one place. So some files would need to get stored locally (.env), others globally(.otl, .py). : /

Did somebody else bend his/her mind around these things? Wonder what's the best solution to it.

Cheers
Tom

P.S.: I wrote a .py script which reads the content of the python folder and creates automatically tool shelves and buttons for each script, depending on the folder they are stored in. That's a big help too to avoid chaos. : )

I think you could keep local home folder for you, and use $SITE for others.
If you worry about others altering, make them read only or sync hda file every startup.

Also read https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/plugins.html [www.sidefx.com]

If you want centrally-controlled live dependencies then you'll have to throw time & money at managing/policing it.

Otherwise: don't use assets. Since everything requires per-shot work they'll just get unlocked and edited anyway.
If locked asset usage is preferable, copy it to $HIP/otls as required, case-by-case.
As for shelftools, its something tops should've been designed to handle…

For your first question, this is why version control systems like git/perforce/etc exist. Perforce in particular, as it syncs your files to every team member but only allows 1 person to be modifying them at once (referred to as checking files out)

In a studio environment engineers usually have some sort of similar system where they have a working repo of tools and publish stable versions to a central repository that all the company machines read from on startup, along with all the necessary job environments etc that get set when you launch houdini from studio command line interfaces. You can set all these dependencies up yourself using pythonrc files the houdini package system, which was developed specifically to address these situations


As for people modifying HDAs, this is typically handled by user permissions, so users cannot modify or save read-only assets. This wont stop people from unlocking or duplicating them though unless you start coding some clever company-wide event handlers or get deep into sysadmin/system security

Thanks everybody for you insights!!! Somebody mentionend a git repo too. Just need to figure out what it is and how it works. : )