i was wondering if houdini is able to or can be configured to open hipfiles that have been gzipped… I thought it did this natively, but i just tried opening a gzipped hipfile on the command line, and while the filename of the gzipped file is displayed in the titlebar, the scene doesnt load anything.

We have that feature in our wrapper – and a nightly process that finds and zips hipfiles. It would be convenient if hip files were zipped natively as you can save a lot of space that way.

seriously. hipfiles gzip very well. (50MB-> 1MB in one test)
I'm certain gzipped bgeos can be read natively in a file sop,
so i thought this would be supported for simply compressed
scene files as well. Obviously files can be compressed in
various ways that may not unpack the same, but a native
attempt would be great.

thanks for the reply.

Isn't the zlib library still shipped with the HDK? Wouldn't that be a way to get it working via the HDK?