I wanted to share a utility I have been developing to tackle a common headache in Houdini: managing broken file paths and scattered images, textures, caches and geometries across large scenes.
The Houdini File Management Tool is a standalone GUI utility designed to give you a centralized dashboard for tracking down, filtering, and modifying external image, texture, cache, and geometry file paths across all node parameters.
Key Features:
- Centralized Path Overview: See all external references (images, textures, geometry, caches, etc.) across your entire scene in one unified interface.
- Advanced Filtering: Filter out specific nodes and parameters using highly customizable rules to isolate exactly what you need to look at.
- Pattern-Based Selection: Quickly target and select parameters based on user-defined string patterns.
- Batch Modifying: Change file paths, update version numbers, or swap directories across multiple parameters simultaneously.
- Batch Copy & Move: Automatically copy or move the underlying external files from their current parameters to new destinations, while updating the internal node paths at the exact same time.
Whether you are handing off a scene to another artist, migrating external files to a new server, or just trying to clean up a messy project, this tool aims to save you the time spent hunting down individual nodes.
I would love to get your feedback, feature requests, or thoughts on what else would make external file management easier for your pipeline.
Check out the tool here: https://github.com/vfxkevin/hou_file_manager [github.com]
Thanks,
Kevin