I am working through the 50 Hints for Houdini by Craig and I ran into a problem. In section 3 he talks about setting up onionskinning in the viewport by going to the OpenGL tab and changing the Clear Viewport setting. There does not seem to be any OpenGL settings in v.9 though. How do I set it up?

If you click on the little gear icon you can edit the parameter interface and get the clear viewport parameter by going to the “For rendering” tab and looking in the Viewport display folder, then it should work

Works great thank you. Do you know why it is hidden like that? Does it just not get used very often? I had heard of it but never tried it before.

I guess its not concidered an important parameter so its hidden to save on clutter.
Of course it does beg the question how new user are supposed to find this stuff, its not in the help anymore either, and you would never be able to go through all the parameters you can add in the edit parameter interface, and even if you did you'd have to guess what they did.

I guess you have to read it in a book like Craig's or try and get a copy of H8 and learn that first…. :?

I can only assume they don't hide anything newly added otherwise there may be loads of great new features that no one will ever know about :roll:

Simon
Of course it does beg the question how new user are supposed to find this stuff, its not in the help anymore either, and you would never be able to go through all the parameters you can add in the edit parameter interface, and even if you did you'd have to guess what they did.

Hovering over the properties in the left-hand list of the edit parameter interface shows the help for that property (you can press F1 from there to open the full help).

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/current/props/viewport.txt [sidefx.com]

Not having all controls by default is certainly a hard thing for new users, but people felt that the trade-off of removing clutter was worth it. You can file an RFE arguing that property X or Y should be available by default.

I'm going to add specific docs on setting up onion-skinning so it at the very least might become more findable.

And if anyone has a good UI suggestion for a better way to handle “obscure” properties, feel free to share.

Matt

I agree with keeping the UI as free from clutter as possible. I don't think it is needed visible by default but it is buried quite deep. Having it added to the help would be great.
Maybe even just a list of the parameters that can be added like that and a very brief description. At least then I would have some idea what was there if I took the time to look through it. At the moment a lot of it would just be trial and error.

jjstanley
Maybe even just a list of the parameters that can be added like that and a very brief description.

It's there, though it's sometimes not pretty.

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/current/props/ [sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/current/props/mantra9_1 [sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/current/props/shop [sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/current/props/vopnet [sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/current/props/viewport [sidefx.com]

The second link above (manta 9.1 properties) is the big one. It lists all the properties that mantra knows about.

Currently there's no docs for properties that correspond to settings of other renderers (e.g. AIR, Rman).

Thanks, I will look through them.