Question for the group… How many paths do you have in your Houdini path?

We are considering a world where we have a path per Houdini plugin instead of our current one where we have all of the plugins in a single path. I'd like to understand if having a bunch of directories in HOUDINI_PATH slows things down appreciably.

Let me know what your studio does.

I can answer for Pixar:

- $HIP
- $HOUDINI_USER_PREFS_DIR
- two user paths (version specific, all versions)
- three per show (local changes, version specific, all versions)
- one for our global software
- one more for 3rd party plugin

Which sums up to 9.

The following command may be helpful to you:

% hconfig -a | grep ‘HOUDINI_PATH :=’ | cut –delimiter== –fields=2 | sed ‘s/\:/\n/g’

MO

Ours is 10 unique paths, mostly pointing to network locations, and while it might slow things down a little, I don't notice it much.

We have a few in-house tool collections that each get their own HOUDINI_PATH entry. For example, one dealing with astronomical calculations, another with pipeline tools, another for planetarium dome related stuff, etc… Pixar very likely has more than we do, though.