Hi,

I would like to ask what is the idiomatic way to delete the inputs of some finished work items upstream?

For example after I converted image frames into a video, how can I delete the input frames?

Thanks in advance!
Mate

Just output your work to a model file using the GeometryOutputROP
In another network use a File node to bring that model file back into Houdini.

At this point, you can throw away the other network effectively deleting all your work, but no body does that, why would you? Houdini caters to the hoarder mentality. You always want to have your old networks around to look through.

“Oh, yeah, I saw that the other day in that one HIP file..?”

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. My question is stricktly PDG/TOPs related. I'll try to be more specific.

I'm prototyping a wedged FX pipeline, where I generate a bunch of geometry, then a bunch of frames from these geos, then a bunch of videos from those frames. Since these renders are not production quality, there is no point to keep the input dependencies on disk after the videos are ready, so I would like to procedurally delete them. (For me it's enough to know the wedge parameters to render a production quality version of the effect.)

What I don't know is how to tell PDG to delete the disk files that a finished work item was depending on.

I hope it makes more sense now.

Cheers,
Mate

I've attached an example .hip file that demonstrates how you could do this. It's built using generic nodes, but you could simply swap these nodes out with ROP Fetch and FFmpeg nodes and it would function the same. You can ignore the second Generic Generator – it's only needed for this demonstration to prevent the Attribute Create node from attaching the images as outputs.

Since you want to delete files that are depended on by a downstream node, you will need to use a partition node to ensure that those downstream dependents (in this case, the node creating the video) have completed before you use the File Remove node to delete the upstream results (the images).

I hope this helps!

Thanks Brandon,

this is what I was looking for and I also found it extra useful because of the generic approach of the example!

Best regards,
Mate