In the manual for digital assets: “Most places you can specify a file in Houdini will also accept a URL. You can use a web server to serve shared .hda asset libraries as well as shared project data (such as textures).” which suggests this is expected to be able to retrieve textures via http(s).

In my hda, I find that a file node is perfectly able to retrieve textures that are specified by URL. However, I am not able to get this to work with textures. In my example, I'm using a Principled Shader, and I'm trying to set the base texture to a texture fetched from s3 (same way as the geometry in the file node). However, it just renders with the lovely pink color when the texture is not available.

Any ideas on how to do this, or is this just something where the manual isn't quite right?

I can make a sample hip(lc) if anyone is interested.

It turns out that this doesn’t work for the file node either (I had something frozen which kept it from trying to load the geometry). So this statement in the manual just doesn’t seem to be true.

It works for me if i dont use https but http:

Havnt tried with S3 assets though.

-b

PS
Works with geo as well. Just re-uploaded the file

I wonder if it doesn't work with https? I did notice at one point, I could get Houdini to hang if I changed the http to an https (but the server would just redirect to https). If that is the case, maybe it is worth a feature request.

I've never been able to get it to work with https either, which is a shame as most sites these days insist on it.

I've gone ahead and submitted an RFE for this. It seems generally useful, and there will only be more sites that require https as time progresses.