All of that should work, please file a bug with your asset attached.

Sorry, are you talking about an example file, not help explaining what the parameters do?

If I put down an Inflate node and click the Help (?) button, I get the documentation for the Inflate node (I haven't read it so I don't know how comprehensive it is, but it exists). What do you mean by “there's no help file”? If it's not working for you please file a bug specifying what you tried and what went wrong.

Thanks!

Not to be defensive, but unfortunately we have a huge mountain of docs that were traditionally written by the programmers, and a shockingly small team trying to keep them up-to-date. If you look at some newer documentation, you can at least see where we're trying to get to:

http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/polybridge.html [sidefx.com]
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/boolean.html [sidefx.com]
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/polyextrude.html [sidefx.com]
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/polybevel.html [sidefx.com]

Besides (or because of) being complex, we don't really have the wide variety of 3rd-party websites that explain things in different ways and make lots of videos, like Maya and Max do. Houdini hasn't been mainstream/required in the industry for all that long (I remember the time when no-one had even heard of it). Hopefully that will slowly improve.

Terminology is a definite problem. Houdini can be set in its ways, and programmers like to call the same thing by three different names. Whenever we have a chance to redo things, I take the opportunity to try to pull us toward mainstream conventions and more consistency.

Regarding C4D's docs, I took a quick look at https://help.maxon.net/#1001 [help.maxon.net] and I gotta be honest, it looks just as bad as Houdini's docs to me. Is there a section that's particularly good I should look at, or a different set of docs somewhere else that I missed?

Thanks for all the feedback so far! Houdini's bread-and-butter is technical improvements and new features, but behind the scenes a lot of us are working long-term on making it easier to use and improving the documentation and tutorials. This feedback helps us out a lot.

Matt

Hi, sorry that bit in the What's New is missing more information and a link, it slipped through the cracks.

To see the “modern” way to do looping, check out http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/model/looping.html [www.sidefx.com]

1. Right click an instance of the asset and choose Type Properties.
2. Click the Help tab.
3. At the bottom turn on Use this URL and enter the URL you want the help button to link to.

Parsing a string like this isn't as easy as you might think. Especially given that:

* It doesn't have a very regular structure (mostly attributes in the form x=y, but also free-floating keywords like “in” and “out” where it isn't clear how they should be interpreted).

* It has quoted strings that would need to be parsed specially if they allow quoting inside.

It's definitely not a quick answer… you'd need to write a parser or else learn how to use a Python parsing library.

IMHO the best bet would be for you to generate the string as JSON instead of as a custom one-off format. That would make writing the info out and reading it back in trivial.

The page you want is https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/vex/snippets. [sidefx.com] I will try to make the links to that page from the nodes more prominent.

BabaJ
But I can't access help from inside Houdini at all. Crashes it everytime.

If something crashes Houdini, please file a bug. Hopefully you have already, so I don't need to say this, but just mentioning it on the forum with no additional information is unlikely to get anything fixed.

I have no control over the search on the website… it's Google Site Search, and I have no idea why it's so much worse than Actual Google. I'm trying to advocate for the company to do the work necessary to enable the native docs search on the website.

Cheers,

Matt

@OneBigTree that traceback is really odd… it shouldn't be possible in “normal” operation. My first instinct is that Houdini might somehow be using an external copy of Whoosh (Python search library) on your machine.

Is it possible you've set the PYTHONPATH env variable somewhere on your system and Houdini is using it and getting the wrong version of this library? You can check by opening a Python Shell and typing:


If it's not empty, you can try checking the directories listed to see if they have a copy of whoosh.

P.S. the best way to get something fixed is to file a bug.

@flyingc Sorry, I just realized it's Windows based on the paths in the traceback.

The pasted traceback doesn't include any error at the end… is it possible you didn't copy the entire thing?

Thanks!

malbrecht
Moin,
the socket thing “catnip” just mentioned is something I have reported twice at least (including bug reports), it happens frequently here. It was supposed to have been fixed, but keeps popping up.

I think they've finally tracked that particular error down… the JPEG library used by the embedded browser can error on certain (valid) JPEGs and prematurely close down the connection to the help server. The devs are working on a fix.

(ETA: you can always paste the URL into an external browser to bypass that error.)

flyingc, can you please let me know which version and platform you see this error on?

Thanks,

Matt

pusat
Can we use Chromium internally?

Houdini is using Qt's embedded browser control. In the current version that's a very old version of WebKit. When Houdini upgrades to the newer version of Qt we'll get the upgraded browser control, which I think uses Blink/Chromium.

pusat
I like the layout but I noticed if you type in the search box the menu that shows up is very long and doesn't let you to browse by category. Most of the time I know the context so I just type something like “polardecomp” and then click VEX category on the right in the old docs.

Thanks, I'll look at that. Note that as a shortcut you can type !v polardecomp to only search VEX.

pusat
Also a lot of the times when you type something there and click the item in the menu, it shows 404 or something similar.

I'm pretty sure that was a bug that's fixed.

I'm working on fixing/finishing things in docs layout. Unfortunately trying to work around issues with the internal browser in the lead-up to 15.0 broke other things (like scrolling on iPad). The docs will look a lot cleaner and work better (at least in an external browser when I'm done.

I know upgrading the internal browser is in the cards for the next major version.

In the meantime, feedback is welcome

When you say loading pages is slow, do you mean in the internal browser, or in a stand-alone browser? The internal browser has issues that one of the developers is working on, but reading help pages in a normal browser should be reasonably fast.

I think the second image is the result of your browser caching the “old” version of the page, it should look like the first image. If you view it in a real browser (not the Houdini browser) and click Shift + Reload it should update.

Some things with help layout were not finished for Houdini 15, but will be fixed and back-ported. The current plan is (when the window is wide enough) to show the page TOC next to the content and have it highlight as you scroll.

You can make your own example files, with explanatory help pages, and link to them in the help (see /help/createexamples). Currently they won't show up in generated lists of examples unless you're running a central server with background indexing. This is something that we didn't get working for Houdini 15, but will hopefully be better in the next version.

Linking the forum is interesting. It's not currently possible, but there are developments afoot that could make it do-able.

The weird characters will be fixed, we weren't specifying the encoding on the page.

There's a menu of visualizers in the toolbar down the right side of the viewport (the icon looks like a map marker). You can add/edit viz'rs there and turn them on or off.

Did you log a bug?

Hi all,

What rendering topics would you like to see documented (or documented more fully) in the Houdini online help?

I realize there are still lots of places in the docs that need work, but I'd appreciate your specific thoughts on priorities for the rendering section, e.g.
“How to”s you'd like to see, or specific topics you'd like to see treated more in-depth.

Thanks,

Matt Chaput
Houdini technical writer