Hi all,

I have a PDG/TOPS network that generates a large variety of procedural assets. The heavy lifting is done in an external SOP which is invoked via a HDA processor node in the PDG/TOPs net.
The whole process runs on a build farm for performance reasons. I'm using a HQScheduler.
So far, everything works fine - when I trigger a cook from within Houdini on my local machine, the HQueue server on the build farm starts creating my assets, properly distributing the workload to the clients.

In the future, I want to trigger the cook remotely without having Houdini open on my local machine.
It seems this should be possible via XMLRPC using the remote API.

I wrote some code that manages to connect to the HQueue server and ping it via XMLRPC, just like in the documentation.
My problem now is to create a job_spec for the “newjob” RPC call.
The documentation shows some examples that trigger a mantra rendering, but none for my case.

How would a job_spec (or alternatively, a command line call) look like if you wanted to cook a PDG/TOPs net on HQueue server?
Is there an easier/better way of remotely cooking assets on an HQueue server without running Houdini locally?

The submit-graph-as-job [www.sidefx.com] function on the hqueue scheduler TOP node submits a standalone TOP Cook job to hqueue. You could do the same thing with your own script, it uses $HFS/houdini/python2.7libs/pdg/job/top.py to do the actual cook. You would need to define a few environment variables for it to work properly, which are shown in the job diagnostics on the HQueue Web UI.