Ok, HDAs finished now, please check if you see any error or want me to add something else


https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y0ti6tyf7o3435u/thsQH1Kf2o [dropbox.com]

HoudiniGuides_Chapter4_HDA_4_WrappingAnHDA.pdf


I will be wrapping this today if there no messages an pass it to Side Effects so please let me know ASAP.

Halfdan, please update the PDF with the version I just saved today Friday at 15.16 as there were a couple of typos and a new link on the last page.

I am very close to start publishing the Data Management guide so make sure you keep an eye…

cheers
jb

jordibares
Halfdan, please update the PDF with the version I just saved today Friday at 15.16 as there were a couple of typos and a new link on the last page.

Done and done!

Thanks, tomorrow more!

Friday surprise…

Data Management 1, 2 and 3 now online.


https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y0ti6tyf7o3435u/thsQH1Kf2o [dropbox.com]


Enjoy

8) Time for a Friday night celebration. Heres to you Jordi.

Data Management 4 and 5 online… 2 more to go and moving on to Rigging!!!!

Enjoy

jb

Well, one more and I will be done, here is the Data Reconstruction section, hope it makes sense… would love to hear from Houdini artists to know if you guys use this technique or if there are better ways to do this.


https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y0ti6tyf7o3435u/thsQH1Kf2o [dropbox.com]

HoudiniGuides_Chapter5_DataManagement_6_DataReconstruction.pdf


Enjoy.

And Data packaging is now done!!!

I bet some Houdini artists will find a few nice tricks in this one.

;-)



https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y0ti6tyf7o3435u/thsQH1Kf2o [dropbox.com]

HoudiniGuides_Chapter5_DataManagement_7_DataPackaging.pdf


I will be adding one more regarding modern approaches with Alembic files before I wrap this chapter.

Enjoy

Jordi,

great work as always!

when you set up all your cache nodes as $JOB/$HIP centric by default, you don't really need preflight that much, but yeah pre-flight is nice to have.

you might want to fix typo in:
page 432, last paragraph.

"I also tick the Alfred Stype progress
for visual reporting on the shell."

Thanks a lot… will fix now.

Pre-Flight is not necessary as you mentioned but I love the fact that it crawls through the scene finding potential issues.. Ultimately I am not a slave of it given its limitations but still I find when developing assets specially it is a way to make sure the asset is as solid as possible.

cheers

FIXED

Cool stuff, Jordi! Keep it flowing.

best,

-T

Hi Jordi,

can You elaborate why $JOB is a bad idea?

Thanks Martin

It's a good idea, but you need some sort of automation for that.
$HIP gets defined every time you open up a .hip
$JOB doesn't

So for a new user $HIP is safer

mh, but with $HIP it is quite hard to tackle bigger projects with sequence or shots sharing assets and models.

I may have to develop further as it was not my intention to put anyone of using $JOB, but it is useful when you build a system around.

You could follow two routes;

1) The more pipelined route in which you use $JOB, this will require (for example) a shell based approach that updates those variables every time you move to another folder, etc… At Realise and pretty much every single place I know this is the method. This is very useful when you have to have concepts like show, episode, sequence and shot information.
An interesting thing that will happen is that once you start using it you will reinvent the concept by defining a set of variables you have full control and are direct pointers to abstract yourself from the directory structure as much as possible.

For example, your company is called Digital Donuts, you may want to build on your shell variables to have direct access like this.

$DDJOB
$DDGEO
$DDMAPS
$DDCACHES
etc…

So ultimately the idea of using just $JOB seems a bit futile, hence the comment.


2) On the other end of the spectrum, a very simple approach you could use would be to use $HIP and as I shown you can use it too in a more advanced way.

For example, let's imagine you have a directory structure like this

…/myshot/
————/hip
————/maps
————/geo
————/caches

and you could reference geo like this

$HIP:h/geo

so it is not difficult to build a simple workflow with $HIP but its true that it is very rudimental so only small facilities may want to follow this approach.

Hope it helps.

I have updated the page to clarify a bit the question..

Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for Your endeavor!

And finally the DataManagement chapter is finished… if anyone things I have missing anything of something should be expanded, drop me a line.


https://www.dropbox.com/sh/y0ti6tyf7o3435u/thsQH1Kf2o [dropbox.com]

HoudiniGuides_Chapter5_DataManagement_8_Alembic.pdf

And you have also the full chapter in one single PDF

HoudiniGuides_Chapter5_DataManagement.pdf

enjoy…

Next stop… Rigging

jordibares
And you have also the full chapter in one single PDF

HoudiniGuides_Chapter5_DataManagement.pdf

enjoy…

We've updated the Sidefx page with this new chapter.