When you have lots of objects in your scene, you can group them nicely in the Network views, stick ‘em in those frame thingies etc - but controlling viewport visibility, and separating things into layers for rendering - well, it all seems a bit crude.

Seems the only way to, say, group objects you want to render together, is to name them in such a way you can use wildcards in the Candidate Objects field. Feels a bit kludgy. And can trip you up. (Oops, I’m accidentally rendering my sim object as well as my cached import)

I'd love the sort of layer management that 3dsmax provides - nameable layers of objects you can switch on and off; even Blender with its old-fashioned 20 un-nameable layers approach is better than nothing.

I gather that Houdini is traditionally used in a large studio environment where they'll have invested in creating their own purpose-built managers to handle this sort of thing, where necessary - and the chances are they won't need them much of the time as Houdini is less likely to used for creating “whole scenes”, rather it's used for adding elements to scenes created and assembled in other software.

Are there any scripts / techniques / third-party plugins I can leverage to wrangle my scenes?

Just to add:

Houdini gives you all the tools you'd need to create the perfect layer-management system. And if you're doing the sort of job where you could be spending weeks on a single scene, you may well be happy enough spending a few hours setting up a node with all the switches you need - heck, you might be happy just diving into a textport and switching stuff on and off with sneaky custom commands.

So rolling your own management setup is absolutely possible. But then you could roll your own “Takes” functionality if you wanted, but SideFX decided it was worth providing a pre-built one for us.

I don't want to spend time rolling my own “Layers” functionality if someone's already done it… no point reinventing the wheel. So is there one out there already I can leverage?

Or are there any other cheeky tips'n'tricks built into H that I as a noob may have missed?

Bundles

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/panes/bundles.html [www.sidefx.com]

:-?

Well if that doesn't look like exactly what I asked for. Thank you, Matthias, much appreciated.

* * *

layer management objects grouping groups visibility bundles layers scene management render layers

Bundles are really great and powerful in that they can be consumed in other parts of houdini as well - say, light list for example. Bundles are managed on the Bundle Pane, away from Network view.

But, a more immediate organization tool, right there in the Network Pane is, Groups. You display the Group tool with Shift+Z. You can control Node selection, Node viewport display, and Node network visibility.

Oooo… groups. Cool, thanks, Daryl.

The trouble with Houdini's docs / training isn't the wealth of resources available - I've waded gleefully through a couple of hundred hours' tutorials in my couple of months with Houdini - it's the lack of a roadmap to ensure you get through - and absorb - the basics. Thank you for your patience, folks

unfortunately you cant transfer bundles to other scenes.

Correctly naming your objects, object merging and wild cards is to go for us

Daryl Dunlap
Bundles are really great and powerful in that they can be consumed in other parts of houdini as well - say, light list for example. Bundles are managed on the Bundle Pane, away from Network view.

But, a more immediate organization tool, right there in the Network Pane is, Groups. You display the Group tool with Shift+Z. You can control Node selection, Node viewport display, and Node network visibility.

Thank you for the Tip Daryl, groups look interesting for sure. However I don't seem to be able to control anything other than the node selection. What do I press to hide the grouped nodes? Or even Network visibilty. I don't see a button for this. I'm using 16.5.293 if that makes a difference.

Am I also able to change the color of the group? right now they are all yellow and double clicking on them doesn't change anything. I feel like something is missing here.

Cheers,

Tim

- I just noticed the blue “D” for display. I'm not sure how I missed that but It answers that! Is there a way to hide the nodes in the network view as well?

S = Select (Select Group in Network View and Viewport)
D = Display (Toggle Group Display flag)
Expose = Manage Group Network View Visibility (Hide/Display Nodes in Network View without affecting Viewport display)
# = Number of Nodes in Group