Is there anything in Houdini to do what Nuke does for localising files? It's a temporary cache to a fast internal disk off a slow network or spindle drive.

Hey fuos,

you could easily create a custom hda that does that for you by pressing a button. using a file cache node…

Cheers
CYTE

Thanks Cyte - really looking for a Nuke-like solution that's elegant, native and robust. My HDA would be neither of those

This is a topic I have been thinking about. I know people would have to deal with this when rendering on the cloud. So I am curious to know what solutions are out there. I am not familiar with how nuke handles this.

For OTLS you can leverage scan paths.. ie get all of the OTLS in your scene and then place a copy of them into something like $HIP/otls

For all other external references you could use variables in paths. $REMOTE_OR_LOCAL_DRIVE/path/to/cache
Then update $REMOTE_OR_LOCAL_DRIVE as needed. You would have to ensure all paths are prefixed with that variable. It would be easy for someone to place a read node and point it to a cache without knowing about that variable.

The trick I am interested in is knowing what external references exist before loading the scene. Which I suppose you could handle by saving a ‘sidecar’ with your houdini scene every time you save, a text file containing all the external references in your scene. This is a little anoying because its another thing to manage and ensure is up to date/

Then on your farm or remote machine before you load houdini:

Should work, thoughts?

Hello,
Would love to know if you got anywhere with this approach? Running into similar issues with otl directories that have lots of files in them.
Thanks,
-Jake