Hey folks. Just sharing an HDA I made to make the process of setting up an asset in a scene for Redshift a little easier. Quality of life type thing. It's basic but it saves a great deal of time when setting up new scenes.

• Right click and "allow editing of contents" to use it properly.
  
• Notes inside explain usage.
  

Enjoy.

I'd like to bump this post. I am seeking a solution to the same problem. Thanks for any help anyone can offer.

Hey folks.

I noticed in the current production build that generating a flipbook is incredibly slow compared to earlier versions. I did a simple animation that plays just fine in real time on the timeline. When I invoked the flipbook it was taking more than a second per frame.

One object. Smooth wired shaded. Default head lamp. Low poly.

Anyone else having this issue?

I sort of fixed my issues. It seems Soft Boolean is really particular about matching or near matching mesh resolution from piece to piece as you progress through the network chain. Unfortunately this does result in higher poly counts in some cases. All in all this is a pretty nice tool.

So I've purchased soft boolean which is an awesome modeling tool. I'm having a major issue on export of models though. Even if I use fuses and clean with a variety of settings I get bad geometry when opened up elsewhere outside of Houdini. Looks great in Houdini, looks terrible everywhere else. Any advice?

Hey folks. Trying to load in a file using wildcards in the path name but it doesn't seem to work.

$OS/folder/*name*.*

What's the easiest way to do this in Houdini?

UPDATE:

The source of the problem in this case was an SSD drive that was being referenced. For some reason everything worked fine when using a different drive entirely. I'll keep troubleshooting whatever the issues are with the SSD drive. I've posted my json content below for the benefit of anyone else wanting to know how to create portable and semi-permanent variables for your Houdini setup. This method has been validated to work fine.

{ "env": [ { "HOME": "H:/houdini_projects_home" }, { "DATA": "H:/tempssd/houdini_data" }, { "TEX": "H:/tempssd/tex" }, { "HOUDINI_AUTHOR": "Tobias_Steiner" }, { "USER": "Tobias" } ] }

jsmack
Does your scene already contain a variable with that name? I believe scene variables take precedence over environment ones.

Good to know. In this case, these are brand new scenes from a fresh application launch. I think I have a suspect for the problem though. I'm working on it now. It may have something to do with the SSD drive being used for testing on my end. Going through a checklist this morning to validate. I'll post an update here later on.

jsmack
I guess I'm not following how the JSON file relates to global env vars. Are you creating a houdini package file?

Yes I am. Verified the file works fine for another user but not me.

Here's a question. Why would native houdini variables update when modified but user created variables be ignored in a json file? Further, why would the exact same json file work for one user but not another using win10 and H19 on different machines?

Update:

Before everyone assumes I'm a moron. I got some help from a colleague and verified that my json does in fact work. There's something wonky on my system that isn't resolving the user environment variables correctly. Working on tracking down the source of that problem.

jsmack

Tobias Steiner
This post is very very old. What is the process for setting permanent global variables in H19? It seems setting alias' still doesn't "stick" from session to session.

Export them in the shell that is used to start Houdini.

I sort of understand what you are saying. I'll be more clear and hopefully that will help in arriving at a more specific answer. So I'm writing a json file that sets basic variables like my home directory for projects. That's pretty simple enough so long as you use the predefined global variables Houdini recognizes.

I guess where I'm stuck since I've never tried it is how to create my own variable, eg "DATA" that always points to a network data drive and have that be read into the "variables" pane in the Aliases/Variables preferences for any project that gets created.

When you say, "export them in the shell", how is that done exactly? Lastly, can I do this right in my json file?

Example:

"env": [

{
"HOME": "H:/houdini_projects_home"
},

{
"DATA": "E:/Houdini_Data"
}

]

"Data" doesn't get created but "HOME" does get updated. Thank you for any clarifications. I appreciate the help.

Edit:

Just to further clarify, I am attempting to approach this using the example given in the Houdini help doc as shown below.

Create and reuse variables

{
"env" :
[
{
"BOB" : "$HOME/bob_tool"
},
{
"BOB_TEST" : "$BOB/test"
}
]
}

This post is very very old. What is the process for setting permanent global variables in H19? It seems setting alias' still doesn't "stick" from session to session.

Ok, here's an approximation for shading Axiom volumes using Material X in H19. I'm sure you magicians out there will be able to improve upon it but this is a decent starting point for those of us interested in the topic.

sekow
here you go (not a pyro shader but should give you a base), its jsut for karmaCPU, there is a XPU Pyro Preview for XPU, but thats not build with mtlx I believe as this not supported yet

Thank you for putting this together. It certainly helps!

Hey folks. I'm trying to figure out how exactly to setup a simple volume shader (fire, smoke, etc.) using the material X workflow. The documentation for this in Houdini isn't helping much. Any advice on the actual setup network would be helpful. Thank you.

Win 10 H19.

Most of the example videos in the help documentation don't work. The source video file, accessed via right click copy source link, does actually work when opened in a separate browser. Just an FYI.

Just a friendly warning for the community. When I updated to the Nvidia driver mentioned in the subject on Win10, Houdini was no longer able to compile the GL shader for polygons. So any lines, meshes, et al polygon in nature no longer could be seen in the viewport. I resolved this on my end by using a different driver, eg rollback or studio driver. Up to you. Just letting you folks know of this to spare you the headache.

Andrea Sbabo
Just to hype it up and to not make you guys sleep in the next days:

Talk Houdini 19 Reveal on Mon Oct 18 from 18:00-20:00 CET
Talk Karma XPU, MaterialX, & Vellum Grains in Houdini 19 on Tue Oct 19 from 09:00-10:00 CET
Talk Using Vellum Fluids & Crowd Updates in Houdini 19 on Tue Oct 19 from 10:15-11:15 CET

From VIEW conference program

Let's hope they took Karma and USD out of isolation from within the Solaris context. That would be sorely disappointing if they didn't. Solaris is only useful to a select few.

Just a quick shout out to MrCatfish for their suggestions on this issue. While they did not work perfectly, they got me a most of the way there for resolving these types of issues. I was inspired to make myself a simple little asset to "pre-process" incoming geometry for RBD material fracturing so I don't have to keep dealing with this headache going forward. For the most part it works for most issues that may exist on the incoming geometry which is a big relief.

I didn't share the asset because honestly it's really not that hard to make on your own and it's good practice for you anyway. Ultimately, it addresses most of the major issues that will cause headaches going into the fracture process. Thought I'd share just to motivate others to do the same for yourselves.

Thanks again to all you wizards out there.