I just put in a fix and it will be available in 18.0.496 or newer. Sorry about that.

This will be fixed in tomorrow's build (Houdini 18.0.494). Thanks for posting about it.

Did you try with Houdini 18.0.472 or newer?

Could you attach a HDA to this post which I can take a look? Or better yet, please submit a bug to support@sidefx.com with an example HDA for me to reproduce the issue.

I just tried with UWP on Unity 2019.4.0f1 and I get no errors. The error you are seeing has to do with .Net 4. If you are still getting the error, you can just comment out the code in HEU_PluginStorage.cs lines 138 to 152. This fixes issues with certain language locales causing problems (such as Spanish). So if you are using English locale you don't need this code to run.

So the generated mesh in Unity is by default set to not readable, for performance friendly reasons. To make them readable, you will need to set a detail attribute named “unity_mesh_readable” with a value of 1.

Yes vector values are supported. The next daily build will also add a “tupleSize” field to HEU_OutputAttribute so that you can get the vector size.

Sorry, the issue was indeed due to the serialization. Since it stored as dictionary, on code domain reload, its being cleared. This will be fixed in next daily build (Houdini 18.0.472).

Ah I see the problem. Since it stored as dictionary, on code domain reload, its being cleared. This will be fixed in next daily build (Houdini 18.0.472).

Perhaps try with multiparm input?

Apologies, I should have check out your sample code. I see what you're trying to do now. Unfortunately, there are 2 problems with it.

First, I believe when transitioning to play mode, the internal attribute data is stored as a Dictionary which is likely being cleared during the code domain reload. So don't use play mode for getting the attributes.

Second, the HEU_HoudiniAsset.GetAttributesStores() function returns the attribute store on the HDA. This is different from the output attribute store (HEU_OutputAttributesStore) which is for each output geometry. To get those, you need to get the output GameObjects, and get the HEU_OutputAttributesStore component on them. See below code. The rootGO is your HDA root gameobject.


Check HEU_ExampleInstanceCustomAttribute.cs which has more example code.

You should be able to access it from any script, as long as you have access to the HEU_HoudiniAsset component.
Note that your HDA has to output a valid geometry, I believe. If you HDA does output that, and has attribute with name hengine_attr_store of class Detail and type String, then it should work.

Attach your HDA if you are still having a problem.

Only 1 Mesh Collider is supported at this time. You can submit a RFE to our support to add this as a feature.

Debug > Open Scene In Houdini will launch a new Houdini with your current session saved out as a HIP file. Its not a live connection to the current session.

To get a live session, you have to launch Houdini first and connect to it from Unity. So after launching Houdini go into Windows > Houdini Engine Debugger. Start a pipe session.

Then in Unity, close your current Houdini Engine session. Then connect to the Houdini debugger: Houdini Engine > Session > Connect To Debugger > Pipe Session.

See https://www.sidefx.com/docs/unity/_session.html#Session_Types_DebugSession [www.sidefx.com]

You have to cook each of the output nodes before you can query geometry data from them (so add a HAPI_CookNode just before the HAPI_GetGeoInfo). Usually we cook the display node before getting the geometry. In this case, depending on how you setup the network, you might have to cook each output node separately.

We'll have to add a new API to get the output node IDs directly. Please submit an RFE to track this. Thank you.

You shouldn't need to copy the PDGDeadline plugin files manually. The TOP Deadline scheduler should take care of that for you (unless you toggled off the `Copy Plugin To Working Directory` parm on the node, under Advanced > PDG Deadline Plugin parms section). The default target directory where it gets copied to is your PDG working_directory/pdgtemp/Plugins. Please check that it gets created.

But the error says that Deadline is not able to copy PDGDeadline.param, so the most likely culprit is that the farm machine is not able to access the working directory where the plugin got copied to. Do your farm machines have network share access to the copied plugins directory when the job is running?

It could also be an issue of mixed paths considering you are scheduling from Windows, and running the job on Linux. Make sure you enable and specify the correct Remote Shared Path. You can check the job files generated to see what the plugin path is that will be used by the farm machines.

But what you ended up doing (i.e. manually copying over the PDGDeadline folder) is okay as a last resort. Just remember to update this folder when you update Houdini installation (since we might change PDGDeadline plugins).

As for your first error with the regular job submission, if you have VPN access to your AWS network, then that is probably due to lack of DNS on your AWS network. If your AWS machines can't “see” your local submission machine then yes, they will fail to report back. For the DNS issue, you can turn on `Use IP Address for PDGMQ` which might help. Or grab today's Houdini build (18.0.446) which will use the new MQ server, which always uses IP address and therefore should not error out.

I wonder if the heu_session.txt file is still being overwritten somehow. Can you check the timestamp on it when you get the problem? Or its contents.

That file is used to keep session info between code domain reloads (code compiles/refresh). If that gets overwritten or becomes incorrect, then it doesn't know anything about the current session.

Can you try using socket based session? To do so, from Unity menu: Houdini Engine > Session > Create > Socket Session.

If that fails, try increasing the session timeout from the plugin settings. To do so, in Unity menu: Houdini Engine > Plugin Settings > Session > Session Timeout (set to 10000)

Sounds like for such a simple asset, it should be fairly fast to cook and generate geometry. Usually the slow down comes from large geometry (lots of vertices or polys), generating textures, large number of parameters, or using dense input geometry. Does the slow down happen for all HDAs for you or just the one?

Please attach the HDA or submit a bug report with it, and I can take a look.

I answered you via support, but I'll post here as well:

Could you enable `Use IP Address for PDGMQ` on the TOP Deadline node under the Deadline section? It might be that its not able to resolve the hostname to IP address due to lack of DNS.

Another option is to use our new MQ server. To do so, set PDG_USE_PDGNET=1 in your environment, then launch Houdini. This new feature will use IP addresses directly.