Hi there Houdini Gurus,

I am having a very annoying issue with the textures. This is on Mac OSX, Houdini 15.523. My graphic card is R395X but the issue is unrelated to the hardware.
I have created a hip file where it reads all the geometry from external obj files and their paths are relative to the hip file. Same goes for the textures. I keep everything external/relative and I am not locking anything hoping to update any geometry or any texture outside of Houdini and in theory once I relaunch Houdini or I kick off a render all would be updated. (I am overwriting the old exr files and old obj files to update them)
Here's the weird thing. After updating the obj and exr files outside Houdini when I open Houdini again and load my hip file I see that all the obj files are updated correctly but all the texture files are still the old ones which no longer exist on the disk. Refreshing viewport, changing to wireframe and back won't work. Even if I open the texture file again it will still show the old version. It updates to the new texture only if I change the name of the file to a new name and point to this new filename. And If I ever rename it back to the original name and point to it, Houdini will show the old/non-existent file again. From this behavior I suspected that Houdini is caching the textures at some point and those caches need to be purged so that I can get the correct textures. I have searched through the forums and saw some posts suggesting that I use the render menu and clean texture caches from there. I will try this when I get back home today but the problem is, I want to be able to clear caches without even launching the Houdini. The reason I am doing this using Houdini is to automate the whole process. But suddenly this becomes a nightmare. Is there any way to clear these texture caches from terminal ? Is there any way not to create these caches in the first place ? Can I automate my workflow like this and keep everything external and update my geo + textures outside Houdini and get everything updated automatically ? Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you.

Search in the Help for “texcache”

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/commands/texcache [sidefx.com]

Hi, it seems like odd behaviour to me as I use a very similar workflow which works fine.

I use Substance Painter for texturing where I repeatedly re-export the textures and switch to Houdini to test the results in Mantra.

Using this workflow I've noticed that the textures will update when;
a) Launching Houdini (updates textures automatically)
or if Houdini is already open…
b) Render>Update textures (for viewport)
c) Render (updates textures automatically)

I've had some issues if “show sequence as one entry” is checked in the file browser so maybe try that?

hope that helps
Rob