First of all Great you are creating this exchange plugin! The assets from orbolt store seem to work, however when i try to import cube.hda (the way noseman showed it on youtube), Cinema 4D gives an error " .hda could not be instantiated".

I think I have installed the trial Houdini engine correctly. Im using Cinema 4D 16.050 Classroom License on Mac OSX 10.10.3.

I tried to save digital assets as all sorts of formats hdanc, hda, otl and so on..

Any hints appreciated!

D

Is your asset created from Houdini Apprentice? Assets that are created from Apprentice are marked as “non-commercial” assets. And Houdini Engine can only load commercial (Houdini FX) or limited-commercial (Houdini Indie) assets, but not non-commercial.

That said, if you are interested in sharing your asset on Orbolt [orbolt.com], there is a way to convert your non-commercial asset into commercial. If you upload your asset onto Orbolt, you can then download a commercial version of that asset back from the store. And you'd be able to load that into Houdini Engine. You could make it either a paid or free asset. We want to encourage artists to create and share assets.

For more info on uploading assets to Orbolt, see http://orbolt.com/become-author [orbolt.com]

yes, i am on apprentice. thanks for your help. i might try it with an educational license next time. but that probably counts as non-commercial, too, right?

That's correct. The Education license also creates non-commercial assets that won't load with Houdini Engine in general. However, if Houdini Engine detects an Education license, it will allow non-commercial assets to load. It's the one exception to the rule.

So, if you have an Education license, you should be able to make this work.

I purchased a indie license today and encounter the same problem.
otl's from Obolt work fine but when I try to create my own otl I get the “……… could not be instantiated”.

What would be the best method on checking where I'm going wrong?

Thanks, Robert

Cinema4D probably didn't display the full error message. It probably would have said:

Limited commercial (Indie) assets not allowed with commercial licenses

You probably have both the Engine trial license and the Indie license installed. Engine trial license, which can't be used to load Indie assets. You need to use the Indie license to load the Indie asset. However, when you load Engine, the trial license actually has precedence over the Indie license.

The best way to fix this is to remove the trial license from your license list. This location of the license file can be found here [sidefx.com]. In the license file, you should see lines like:

LICENSE Generic Houdini-Engine 14.0 1 01-aug-2015 +.+.+.+ machine_name (license code) \
(more license code)

LICENSE Generic Houdini-Indie 14.0 1 01-aug-2015 +.+.+.+ machine_name (license code) \
(more license code)

You simply need to comment out the “Houdini-Engine” license with a pound (#). Run the License Administrator [sidefx.com] to verify that the Engine license is indeed gone. You may need to restart your license server [sidefx.com].

This should ensure that your Engine is running with the Indie license, which will let you load assets that are created from Houdini Indie. Note that you can continue to load Orbolt assets with the Indie license.

awong
Cinema4D probably didn't display the full error message. It probably would have said:

Limited commercial (Indie) assets not allowed with commercial licenses

The best way to fix this is to remove the trial license from your license list. This location of the license file can be found here [sidefx.com]. In the license file, you should see lines like:

LICENSE Generic Houdini-Engine 14.0 1 01-aug-2015 +.+.+.+ machine_name (license code) \
(more license code)

LICENSE Generic Houdini-Indie 14.0 1 01-aug-2015 +.+.+.+ machine_name (license code) \
(more license code)

You simply need to comment out the “Houdini-Engine” license with a pound (#). Run the License Administrator [sidefx.com] to verify that the Engine license is indeed gone. You may need to restart your license server [sidefx.com].
.

Thanks Awong, that worked indeed.
Would be nice to have a more convenient way of doing this ;-) but I'm happy that now I can proceed.

Kind regards, Robert

thanks for the advice!