Hi,

I've had a consistent problem that is becoming more and more vexing the more HDAs I develop. Every time Houdini crashes on me, when I reopen the most recent autosave file, all the HDAs in the project forget their pathing and end up 'embedded' in the project itself. Then I have to manually re-save them all to their original paths. Is this a known issue? Is there anything I can do to prevent it? Currently my paths are hard-coded.... perhaps relative pathing would fix it?

Hello,
I'm attempting to get PDG rendering on my Deadline farm with the Deadline Scheduler. Here's the error I'm getting when I attempt to cook:



16:19:26: PDGNet MQRelay stopping Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:/PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.339/houdini/python3.7libs\pdg\callback.py", line 104, in __getattr__ return getattr(self._cpp_object, attr_name) AttributeError: '_pdg.Scheduler' object has no attribute 'addCommonJobVars' During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred: Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:/PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.339/houdini/pdg/types\schedulers\tbdeadline.py", line 1087, in onSchedule self._scheduleRootJob(work_item) File "C:/PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.339/houdini/pdg/types\schedulers\tbdeadline.py", line 1829, in _scheduleRootJob self.tempDir(False), frames, job_name, False) File "C:/PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.339/houdini/pdg/types\schedulers\tbdeadline.py", line 1725, in _generateJobPluginFiles self._getJobEnvDict(job_env, work_item) File "C:/PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.339/houdini/pdg/types\schedulers\tbdeadline.py", line 1759, in _getJobEnvDict self.addCommonJobVars(job_env, None, tbut.verbose_log) File "C:/PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.339/houdini/python3.7libs\pdg\callback.py", line 108, in __getattr__ raise AttributeError(error_str) AttributeError: 'DeadlineScheduler' object has no attribute 'addCommonJobVars' 16:20:18: PDGNet MQRelay stopping



The job entitled PDG MQ fails immediately, but at least is visible in Deadline Monitor.

I tried pulling the project into Houdini 19.0, and while I had errors opening the file, I was still able to successfully get a job cooking via Deadline.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Have spent days on this!

I also have this issue and have since stopped using sessions with Unity and Houdini.

Hola! If I could manage this in Unity, it would be so useful:

I've got Houdini Engine for Unity creating a bunch of trees and terrain detail for me, and I'm currently creating a slot for every detail layer and tree prototype that I need. This is resulting in creating a lot of repetitive slots once I get into ingesting model variations of detail that I'm propagating across the terrain. See attached image, and imagine the amount of slots getting way, way more plentiful once I start adding model_variation_1, model_variation_2, etc.

Is it possible to feed Houdini Engine a list of prefabs, rather than single prefabs? If I could just drop a group of prefabs into the asset parameters without having to "hard-code" every slot, that would be amazing. And to be clear, I'm talking specifically about terrain trees and detail.

I would also like to know if it's possible to enable this property via Houdini. Am currently just enabling it manually every time I rebuild.

Thanks for the tips. I should have mentioned that I am familiar with the path attribute for rebuilding the hierarchies. The most challenging part for me is to maintain all the transforms as well as hierarchy. Houdini wants to make all the pivots centroid, which is not what I'm wanting. I've tried copying over intrinsic attributes from the original FBX import, but this seems to create wonky exports in Unity even when everything looks correct in Houdini. I am able to maintain all the original pivots and transforms when I import objects that have no hierarchy, strangely.

So I can get it to export hierarchy using the path attribute, and I can get it to maintain transforms if exporting with no hierarchy, but I can't have both! It's definitely a head-scratcher.

Concerning game asset pipelines:
Has anyone developed a system in Houdini that can ingest a model from a place like Turbosquid and spit out said model to Unreal or Unity with things like LODs, all while maintaining all hierarchy and transforms? Creating LODs is easy enough with Labs tools, but maintaining all hierarchy and transforms... That seems to be the hard part.

Hello,
So a newbie like myself would think that importing and then immediately exporting an FBX in Houdini would result in a file identical to the same file that was originally imported, but apparently that is not the case.
What would one have to do to be able to import an FBX into Houdini and then export this FBX in a way that maintains hierarchy, transforms, and pivots?
I've tried using the path attribute to rebuild the hierarchy, but I am only able to get centroid or origin pivots out of this process. Not able to maintain the original pivots. Help a dummy out! Thanks for any help!

Hello,
I'm having issues importing FBX files from 3DS Max and exporting FBX files out of Houdini, so I'm trying to simplify everything to figure out how to move forward.

In my ultra-simple test, I've got two nodes - an FBX Archive Import and a ROP FBX Output. A beginner might think that the FBX being output would be identical to the FBX being imported, since there are no nodes between the import and output nodes. When I export the FBX back to 3DS Max, it doesn't maintain hierarchy. When I use the path attribute to rebuild the hierarchy, I lose all my pivots and transforms. Note: I don't want to simply create centroid pivots, but rather just keep the pivots and transforms I had in 3DS Max.

What am I missing that I need to insert between the import node and the export node that would give me a 1:1 match (including identical hierarchies, transforms, and pivots)with the model that I had exported from Max in the first place? Any insights are greatly appreciated. I've blown away several days trying to figure this out with intrinsic properties, attribute wrangles, foreach loops, and I'm clearly just not bright enough to understand what to do. Thanks for any help! I'm definitely a beginner.

Cheers,
Andy