Hi there,
I am a new user. But until now I am very convinced of Houdini.
I have a little Project now, and I am not sure how to manage it in an effective way.
First, lets say what I want. I have a camera movement through a more or less static scene. There is a house in a landscape, and the camera is coming from around 400 meters in the far to a closeup of a sign at the house. The grid, that makes the landscape should look like gras (a different problem for me, but I dont want to talk about that here(I tried the fur help and tuts and different other approaches)). On the landscape there should be some trees. In the Background there should be a billboard with some faked tree-textures. Maybe there should be two or more other Houses and a car that is standing somewhere in the scene.

What I did until now I have the grid for the landscape, and it is edited to have some hills etc. I have the billboard object in the background. I have a placeholder for the house. The camera movement animation is finalized and works.
+ I did starting to model the main-house in a different hipnc file.

This is what I think to be the way to create that scene. Having the landscape and everything in the scene file, and modell all the Houses, trees, cars etc. in there own files.

At this time, with working on the main-house, I added a ROP to the house file and saved out the geometry of the house to a .bgeo file. In my scene file I added a file node and loaded the bgeo of the house, and I replaced the placeholder-box with this geometry.

At this point I am not shure if this is the best, the effective approach to the workflow. I think of building a library of models to reuse in this current, and in any future scene. In my naive mind, I would like to open a hipnc file for import, select a node there, and import it to another scene with all subnodes it has. If the hipnc file was changed, opening a ‘scene file’ will do the import again and has automatically all changes from the hipnc(model) file updated.

That's something I think about my mainhouse model. If it comes to trees, I would like to use the lsystem deciduous demo file as a basic tree (because at this moment its impossible to learn as much on lsystems for me, to get such a result on my own) … then I would like to put some of that trees to my scene (on scattered points e.g.) but change slightly some of the lsystem parameters with stamping. I think that can't be done by a ROP gemoetry export. So maybe I could think of making a digital asset out of the tree, that will give me one to five parameters for changing the look of it.

At that point I only know these two ways to share models from single files to scenes in other files (geo export and DA). What do you think is the most effective way, the fastest way (when it comes to rendering a sequence) , the best way … or are there other, better ways????

I hope you understand my problem. How to share geometry (and maybe shading) from one ‘library file’ for reuse in different ‘scene files’ in the best way?
regards
Frankie

Simple answer: Digital Assets.
You can build all your props in separate files if you wish. Take your house. Build it as a series of separate objects or all in one object if you wish. Assign your materials. Render. Approved.
Then wrap it up in to a digital asset.
You want to have a simple project directory. In that directory create a directory called:
otls
Save your digital asset inside that otls directory. Make sure to save the houdini .hip scene file in the project directory. Any new scene opened up from that project directory will see any digital assets inside the local otls directory.
On Windows I will usually save an empty hip file in the project directory called “start_here.hip” that you double click on then do a save as to another proper name. That file will see all the assets inside otls.

Now if you edit one of those digital assets inside the otls directory, all files referencing that asset will receive the updates. That is what you want. It allows you to block out your assets and start composing your shot. Then go back and refine your assets seamlessly.

As for trees, yes that will work. You can point instance one tree on to many scattered points. See the old school blog:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1050&Itemid=216 [sidefx.com]
on how to set that up. The instancepoint() expression can only change object and shader level parms (no, sop parms promoted up to the object level won't work.).

Don't forget to include compositing in to the mix. If you have a tremendous amount of background trees, render that as a separate layer and composite with your favourite tool. Houdini's compositor is excellent building layers. Also allows you to add depth of field if you separate foreground and background elements.

Thanks a lot for your answer jeff!
That helps a lot to plan my ongoing work.
And thanks for the advice regarding the trees and the layerrendering. I will try that out.
- Frankie