kenxu
HDAs placed in levels will sometimes stop updating while others placed HDA's of the same type continues to work. Only solution to this so far is to delete the HDA and place a new one.

This is a fairly recent issue, we will investigate.

Still noticing this in the latest version of UE / Houdini

Yeah…. the UE4 responsiveness is abysmal. I've been going through the Guard Tower tutorial, and placing the sandbags in UE4 is just just … painful.

It takes roughly 20 seconds to recook the asset after I move a curve point or change a parameter on my asset.
And that's with 16 cores and a GTX 1080.

So since I just had some confusion with this myself, here's a bit more detail for the next person who comes along:

1. In a Houdini Shell, if you use “hconfig -ap” you'll see the priority of the HOUDINI_PATH.
   
2. By default, when you add an HSITE variable, it will be placed in priority after the user prefs. This means that as long as there is no houdini.pref file in their home directory the HSITE preferences will take over… but once there's a file in their home… you can't force anything on them.
   
3. If there is one preference you want to force, then you'll need to manually set the HSITE to come first in the priority by building the HOUDINI_PATH yourself.
   
4. If you leave it as houdini.pref in your HSITE, then users can save preferences however they want (but the one or two you've specified will overwrite theirs)
   
5. If you leave it as houdini.pref.nosave, then users may not edit any preferences
   

I assume you're trying to get normals pointed along a curve by using edge_dir as your N attribute?

1. Place down a polyframe node
   
2. Style = First Edge
   
3. Tangent Name = N
   
4. Other parameters off
   
5. insert a reverse sop before the polyframe to make the attribute face the direction you want
   

When I look in the bin folder, I see that we have

• hescape.exe / houdinicore.exe / hhalo.exe / hselect.exe / basehoudini.exe
  
• houdinifx.exe / houdini.exe / hmaster.exe
  
• hscript.exe / hbatch.exe / rscript.exe / hhalo-ng.exe / hmaster-ng.exe
  

I'm curious if the redundancy is just legacy? Or if there's a difference between the different executibles?

Allegro
Or maybe it's a Windows issue?

So from what I can tell, hexpand and hcollapse don't work with windows, and instead you use hcpio [www.sidefx.com]. Is there any other documentation than this for this utility? I seem to be able to use hcpio to extract the .hip file into folders/files however I'm not having any luck using

"[where exe is located]\hcpio.exe" -o -O .\test.hip

After I enter that in the command line, it just sits there doing nothing… if I type a file name, it lets me move onto a new line, and if I type anything else it says "Warning *.* not found - skipping. Not sure what else I should be doing to assemble the .hip file.

I've never attempted to use hexpand before. Is it still working in H16?
Or maybe it's a Windows issue?

If I attempt to run the Houdini Command Line Tools,

'hexpand' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

You're… replying to a 9 year old thread. All I can say, is that the original videos are no longer available (or relevant).

I would think that the digital tutors one you referenced is also out of date since it's for Houdini 14.

I'm curious if there's a better way to interpolate a texture map from a source geometry to a volume than what I'm doing in the attached file. Using a scatter, and an attribute transfer seems to be a real bottle neck, and so I'm wondering if there's a way to directly interpolate the uvs from the original geometry either onto the point cloud before the volume from attrib, or directly into a volume.

I figured there must be a way either with a wrangle or a vop, but I can't seem to find anything appropriate.

Ah! Cheers, thanks for that. (Would have responded earlier, but didn't get any notification email for some reason )

Is there no way to enable this? Or are we stuck using velocity blur?

Hmm… packed primitive seems to motion blur just with v, but I'll keep it in mind next time I try instances.

I've never used the angular velocity on the trail sop. After spending a half hour looking at it right now, I'm no closer to understanding it's use. Anyone able to provide an example of when you would want this attribute to be created?

My understanding is that op: is used the same fashion that you might use file// in Google chrome instead of http:. It helps to communicate to the underlying code that you want to use a file that exists within Houdini rather than a file on disk.

It's worth remembering that you can navigate Houdini through the textport the same way as you would a shell in Linux. cd /obj for example will navigate you to the obj network in that textport. So when you use op: you are telling Houdini to navigate to that node in the internal Houdini file system.

So an ideal place to put it, for example, would be on the “Get Attribute” vop inside of a compositing network. In this context, the Input options are File, or First through Fourth Inputs. The input options are useless if you want to read an attribtue from the SOP context, so this leaves you with using a File. You *could* write your SOP to disk, and read in a bgeo file, or you could use op: to navigate to the node in Houdini that you want to read rather than a bgeo file on disk.

As opinputpath() allows you to go several levels up, you could have a vop, inside a cop, inside an object level hda, reference a sop, inside an object that is plugged into the hda.

I'm trying to use the H15 baking workflow for the first time, and it doesn't seem to work too well… I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing wrong, or if there's something broken. I'm attempting to use a slightly modified version of what's in the help documentation example file.

Maybe someone else has had luck with it and can shed some light on what I might be doing wrong?

Attached is a zip file with the modified example file.

As you can see from the attached image, the tangent normals are not rendering correctly and result in some areas being inverted, and others with clear seams.

I see that the “shading point” and the “bake shader” material is not rendering the same in PBR as non-PBR. But I also feel like any of the metals (silver, platinum, copper, aluminum, iron, gold, titanium) are not rendering as expected when compared to say, the oxidized steel, or coated metal paint.

Attached are some renders from H15.0.313

Sorry to revive something from so long ago, but it seems that over time the documents have gotten even more sparse rather than being expanded upon.


I see that the various parameters still exist in the mantra properties, however they're organized slightly differently than what is explained in the H11 docs.

There no longer appears to be documentation at all for making environment maps in H15.

Following the instructions for H11 didn't appear to render anything for me, so I'm curious if the Auto-Generate Environment Maps/Output Picture/resolution parms still is a viable workflow

edit: n/m… what I'm seeing is a separate issue.

I'm missing tab completion in the HScript Editor

For reference, if you are confused, (as a new user is likely to be) and think that the blue highlight insinuates that the new edge loop is selected…. following the prompts to press enter can not only simply not give you a bevel, it can undo the edge loop you've placed.

See video:

https://youtu.be/evP4KHcfOx0 [youtu.be]

While we're at it, I'd really love for the bevel to regain it's ability to maintain edge selection that it used to have in earlier versions of Houdini.


Ie: in Houdini 13:
-place down a box
-use the edgeloop tool
-immediately use the polybevel tool

in Houdini 15:
-place down a box
-use the edgeloop tool
-attempt to use the polybevel tool
-get sad that it doesn't respect the edge you used to have selected.