SYmek
What I can tell you is that SESI is suggesting of using your system's native Python installation. The one that comes with Houdini is stripped down and lacks some modules.
Hi All,
Just to clariy…
On Linux, we recommend using the system's native python version. Houdini and hython are set up to work seamlessly either with the python package installed in $HFS or in /usr (or whereever else your system might install it). Python modules installed by the OS' package manager are suppose to work ‘out-of-the-box’ with the system's python distro and hence with Houdini/hython.
On Windows, however, we cannot rely on the system's python distro (which is usually installed in C
Python25). The problem is that we are not guaranteed that the MSVC compiler used to build C
Python25 is the same version as the one to build Houdini/hython. This is more apparent on Win64 machines where Houdini is built with MSVC2005 while python, I believe, is built using MSVC2003 by default. So on Windows, Houdini ALWAYS uses the python that's installed in $HFS.
SYmek
But before that Houdini won't import anything because it can't see it unless you put you modules in a place houdini can find it, like: $HFS/scripts/python or (better) $HOME/scripts/python.
This is a great suggestion. You can put your python modules in $HOME/houdiniX.X/scripts/python and Houdini/hython will definitely find them. As an added note, you can also modify the HOUDINI_SCRIPT_PATH environment variable so that Houdini searches other directories for python scripts.
For example, if you add “C
some_path/scripts” to HOUDINI_SCRIPT_PATH, Houdini will be able to find python modules in C
some_path/scripts/python.
One caveat to all of this is that when installing python modules on Windows, any compiled extensions (i.e. *.dll or *.pyd files) must be built with the same compiler used to build Houdini (as mentioned above). For win32, we use MSVC2003 and for win64, we use MSVC2005.
I hope this helps.
–Rob