I have a simple geometryimport top set to create work items for each primitive piece attribute from a sop path

This creates a primitiveattribs array containing the names of all the primitive attributes included in ‘copy attributes’ parameter

This all works fine, but how can I get the value of each of those primitive attributes (as they would appear in sops) and set them as work item
? I can only get the attribute name as a string, how would you go about getting the values and creating work item data from them?

If you set the piece attribute as a string, the piecevalue pdg attribute will contain the value of the string. How can I do that for all the other attributes?

Thanks

Hey Ken thanks so much for the info, the houdini command chain workflow is exactly what I was looking for, tested and works like a charm

From watching the PDG masterclass I understand its a bad idea to use hou module python code as its not thread-safe

However where does this restriction apply exactly, is it just for writing python processors etc in PDG, or is python in HDAs, python sops etc going to cause problems?


In a specific case I have a custom FBX import HDA that imports FBX files using the hou.hipFile module, creates materials on the fly (in an editable material network inside the HDA), and generally creates and deletes a lot of nodes during processing. Each HDA instance is only really meant to import 1 fbx file/hda, as it requires an actual file>import to generate materials, so until now ive written scripts to run this over a folder of files and generate an HDA per fbx file.


Is there any way to get this sort of setup to work with PDG? Can you physically create nodes with PDG, or is that not going to work? Will the HDA processor work with embedded python code, especially if it is trying to create/destroy geo, or is any hou module in HDAs not going to work at all?


Given that the HDA needs to physically create materials and store them in an HDA instance, I dont see how that could work the the HDA processor, but I'd really like to know what the limitations and options are here for all the above and working with hou python code in general. Thank you!

Is there a way to override the entire pdg network to batch run in-process?


The hython spin-up overhead is way too much for many simple things that cook instantly like writing a CSV file, especially for large scenes with lots of HDA libraries and disk dependencies this can take several minutes just to write a file that should cook instantly


Furthermore I have run into several scenarios where everything cooks completely fine when running in-process like manually hitting render on a rop node but errors out completely when trying to run as a batch, with almost no error messages or log other than ‘task failed’. In all cases it involves importing alembic files using @pdg_attributes in the alembic sop filepath generated from a file pattern node, running through sops & writing geo back to disk + writing out csv files (gamedev csv exporter via rop fetch)


I tried using a python processor duplicating the upstream work items with inProcess=True flag but that either A)fails outright with no log, just State:Failed in the task info, or B) immediately hard crashes houdini, 50/50. The script works fine without the in-process flag.

As a side note how can you debug python processors that fail this way? There are no error messages, exceptions or logs it just says state:Failed, no log generated



The other errors I am getting are from a rop fetch pointing at the gamedev csv exporter writing a csv file for each alembic file -
Error rendering child: /obj/topnet1/ropnet1/rop_csv_exporter1/shell1

It renders fine if I go through manually clicking each work item and hitting render on the csv export rop, but nothing Ive tried will make it render in batch.

Thanks in advance for any help