Hello, I'm new to Houdini. I love it so far, but it is quite different from Maya so there are a few things I still need to wrap my head around. The title pretty much sums up my question. I'd like to know how to merge nodes of different types into one single node. I am modeling a character and it seems as though all the changes I have made to the basic geometry are slowly taking up memory. I imagine it will eventually cause a crash which isn't ideal. So how can I clean it up? Thanks for the help.

You don't merge down. The “houdini way” is to either lock the node (the red button second from the left on your last node), which results in houdini not cooking upstream and instead caching the geo into the .hip file or to use a file cache node and do that manually, with an external .bgeo file.

I personally prefer option 2, because the other bloats the .hip files, but that is down to personal preference and project needs/loads.

protozoan
You don't merge down. The “houdini way” is to either lock the node (the red button second from the left on your last node), which results in houdini not cooking upstream and instead caching the geo into the .hip file or to use a file cache node and do that manually, with an external .bgeo file.

I personally prefer option 2, because the other bloats the .hip files, but that is down to personal preference and project needs/loads.

Thank you for your response protozoan. Sorry for my late reply. Are there any tutorials showing the second method? It sounds like Houdini would benefit in making it an SOP tool if it isn't already.

Hello Jeff,
There are already SOPs to do that e.g. file SOP, ROP out driver.
Here's a sample file to show you.

MiKE

Or use the File Cache SOP. Which is just an HDA with a ROP output driver and a file SOP nicely packed together.

-b