Hi
I'm trying to figure out the best workflow to publish HDAs for a team environment. Instead of having it all self contained, I would like many of their subcomponents (icons, help content, etc) as external references so they can be worked on, updated fast without having to save the HDA for every little tweak. I see Houdini now offers for Commercial use, an "unpacked format" for assets where instead of a file it's a folder. Promising but Unreal Engine doesn't accept them, and so creating a yet another "use version" will slow down Houdini<>Unreal testing.
Native nodes seem to have a lot of their content relying on zip files under /config and /help. But from my testing using my own package, even unzipped a lot of these folder don't seem to work. Even SideFXLabs seem to have issues loading images or favicons:
Help images
For example if I put in a help file this will render one of Measure SOP's help images, but if I put a puppy.jpeg in the same folder structure of my own package, $TEST/help/images/sop/puppy.jpeg, won't work. So where should I put images to have them easily referenced from help?
-Help files
The text files seem to work as the documentation states (!) by being placed at /help/nodes// at the houdini package.
-Help favicons
Don't seem to work at all for help wiki rendering.
or don't work, as well as (/config/Icons).
RESULTS FROM A LOT CODE TESTING:
-HDA node icon
Fails with:
SOP_dog or SOP_puppy (Testing targeting of /config/Icons/sop/dog.svg or /help/icons/sop/puppy.svg)
/nodes/sop/puppy.svg (Targeting /help/nodes/sop/puppy.svg)
But works with:
SOP/dog (Targeting /config/icons/sop/dog.svg)
dog (Targeting /config/dog.svg)
$TEST/config/Icons/SOP/dog.svg
$TEST/help/icons/sop/puppy.svg
Is there a variable to reference files relative to the HDA file location? Something like $HDA/ ? I see the Operator Type Properties has some variables:
So I'm wondering; is there an abstract way to reference subcomponents contained in the same folder as the .hda file or in a subfolder?
Overall seems I'll have to have the same icons files in both /config/Icons/* and /help/nodes/* in order to access the same icon in both the HDA node icon and the help wiki favicon.
I guess I can put the images in a subfolder of /help/nodes/* but I would like a clarification on the best supported way to deal with them.
Thanks
prb
