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mheberlein
Hey guys,

it's possible to copy/paste nodes and subnetworks across different Houdini instances. This is great and really handy but we could not find a way to export the same nodes to disk: The File > Export menu lists Alembic and FBX but no Houdini format. We'd like to store just the selected node networks.

Saving the complete .hip scene file and merging it into another scene could be a workaround but everyting else (which could be a lot and possibly “hidden”) whould have to be deleted before exporting or after importing.

Are we overlooking something?

Thanks,
Michael
bonsak
You should definitely look into digital assets [sidefx.com]

-b
mheberlein
I know Houdini digital assets are very powerful and from what I understand, they can be described as a combination of models and compounds to Softimage heads .

But instead of simply exporting stuff, “New Digital Asset From Selection” is going to
- create a subnetwork from the selection,
- save it to an “asset library” location,
- display various warnings about references to external nodes,
- open the “Operator Type Properties” window,
- warn about external references again,
- and “install” this HDA to make it accessible via the tab menu.

That's a lot of stuff going on. It is great for digital asset creation but feels pretty bloated for simply storing one or two nodes that I want a colleague to just import without any candy on top.

If there's no other way, we are of course going to go with digital assets and (if possible) write a script to skip all those steps.
goldfarb
you can script out the nodes
check out asCode() :
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/hom/hou/Node [sidefx.com]
mheberlein
Thank you, I'm going to try this!
NNois
Hi,

You're right the method you both describe are bloated BUT …

… there's just the One click solution your after, the “Gallerie” just click drag your subnet or single node to the galerie and voila ;-)

In the network view that's the first icon from the left.

You can right click and change the path of your item if you want for example to share a same gallerie between users. you can also install a gallerie in the houdini.env file
mheberlein
Cool, thanks - looks like all three options can be the right choice, depending on the situation.
el_diablo
I usually use something like this to save out selected nodes:

import hou
sel = hou.selectedNodes()
filename = "nodes.cpio"
contextnode = hou.node('/obj') # change to the parent of the selected nodes or you could use sel[0].parent()
contextnode.saveChildrenToFile(sel, [], filename) # here the empty brackets are a empty list of networkboxes, populate if needed

There is also an companion of hou.Node.loadChildrenFromFile(). Also copy paste across houdini instances basically does the same thing. Check out your tmp folder when you do CTRL-C. There should be OBJ_copy.cpio there if you copy from obj context, same for others (OUT etc.).

Also its good to know that hip and hda are also cpio archives for the most part and can be manipulated with cpio (listed, extracted, inserted).
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