I am having horrible time making an HDA. I watched ton of videos and I am doing as shown. I use ALLOW EDITING OF CONTENTS to unlock it, I make changes in settings and then I use SAVE NODE TYPE and SAVE ASSET, then I press MATCH CURRENT DEFINITION and changes are NOT being saved plus Houdini is just making weird changes in naming convention and my asset is called Owner_name of asset instead just what I just named a god damn thing. It's like does everything in Houdini has to be a bloody nightmare. Ugh..
So I exported the plugin on my desktop but it still carries this weird Owner_... name. Is it even possible to rename it? Nothing works so far, it's like you gotta be really careful when you are coming up with a name because it can never be changed after that. SO do I have to redo the whole thing and rename it or is there a way to rename it by like...typing a name?
And how is that done ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwXZT3eaW4E [www.youtube.com]

Thanks

In the video you aren't changing the default on|off state of your "grip" parameter for the HDA by toggling it in the parameter pane like that. Instead you need to select "Type Properties" in the right-click menu and change the default value for the parameter. What you are doing in the video is simply changing the parameter value for that particular node instance of the HDA since each one can have its own unique set of parameter values. To change the defaults for the HDA definition you need to edit the type properties.

Oh and to change the name of an asset you can duplicate it in the Asset Manager pane and then delete the original. I'm not sure what's going on with the owner_... thing though. Maybe post a screen grab of the Type Properties for your HDA.

You can copy the parameter settings from your edited hda to the definition with this option under type properties:

@antc and @mestela thank you very much. I was working on it for a moment and I got really upset that I can't finish it due to whatever that was happening (which you clarified) but in my defense I watched a ton of tutorials and read CG Wiki and some other stuff and I wasn't able to find any clearer solution. So I will provide the hda hoping that would make it easier for you to see what's going on. Basically it's a little simple plugin that I intended to be "quick and dirty" solution for creating tentacles or tentacle-like animatable procedural geometry that wouldn't require rigging.

@antc So based on what I see in properties it's a value of "0" for the Grip which I assumed was like boolean/True/False kind of a statement that would imply that it's negative thus OFF. Is this correct ?

Now interestingly enough you see this HDA as "KRAKEN MASTER" but once you import it into Houdini it appears as "Owner_kraken_master1" I don't understand how to rename it but I will give it another attempt with what you both suggested.

Ok, @mestela that "Copy Defaults From Node" definitely did help with saving my changes. I just don't understand why nobody has yet covered this in so many videos and pages I read. I literally just learned this from you and I am very grateful. Houdini has some of this important functions very enigmatically labeled and sometimes in a very unlikely places

@antc I have managed to Duplicate the node in Asset Manager and change it's name and then I deleted the original. This time I named it Tentacle Master so that worked and it loads as Tentacle_Master1. I guess number 1 is Houdini's way of labeling nodes as every node has "1" after I load a very first instance of it.

I attached last version I added missing "Save to disk" function and changed a color of the initial tentacle to test saving option and it worked. Also "Grip" is finally OFF by default

Thank you so much guys. Let me know if this is how HDA is suppose to be or if it even works in your Houdini. At this point I don't know if it works anywhere outside of my Houdini hahah This is my first HDA so I am trying to figure my life out haha.

Also I tried to upload this on Orbolt and I was informed that there is some "dependency issue" because I used LABS SPIRAL node in my HDA. I don't know what dependencies are so do you guys know anything about that?

Glad you got it working. I don't know much about uploading assets to orbolt unfortunately , however I think the message is telling you that the labs spiral HDA you're using needs to placed into a unique namespace, most likely so that the node definition doesn't clash with other versions the end user might have downloaded and installed.

The namespace is just the portion of the name preceding the first "::" characters. To rename the spiral HDA you can use the same duplicate/delete workflow as before. There's more info on HDA naming, namespaces and versioning here:

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/assets/namespaces.html [www.sidefx.com]

Also, don't forget that the node type name is different from the on-disk filename. That's because hda files on disk can hold multiple node types. For example you could create a file on disk called "utils.hda" and in there have a "spiral" and "sweep" type definitions. If you plan to distribute your nodes it's important that the type name doesn't clash. Therefore "spiral" is not a great name and so a namespace can be used to make it unique - NikodimFomich::spiral for example. It doesn't matter that the filename - utils.hda - is not unique because the end user can just place it in a different directory or even rename the file. At load time houdini will search all hda files on disk for NikodimFomich::spiral.

Nikodim Fomich
Also I tried to upload this on Orbolt and I was informed that there is some "dependency issue" because I used LABS SPIRAL node in my HDA. I don't know what dependencies are so do you guys know anything about that?

The dependency issue is because you're using an OTL that Orbolt has no knowledge of as it's not part of Houdini. When your asset is installed from Orbolt, the end user possibly won't have this node installed and your tool will not function.

You'll have to rebuild the tool as to not make use of external tools.

@jsmack Oooh I see. Thank you for clarifying that. I did think how not everyone has Labs stuff installed but then I thought maybe this one Labs node would be packaged with my plugin anyway but that's wrong way of thinking as HDAs are only scripts and they make use of existing, pre installed nodes rather than pulling in new 3rd party nodes. I might have to make my own spiral tool I guess.

@antc I see. Thank you, I will look into that. I was wondering what "::" was for. So far I was copying and pasting or renaming the entire HDA. Labs Spiral is just one node inside the HDA. SO would renaming the node itself do anything?
Thank you

You should be able to embed a copy of the labs spiral hda into your hda, and point your instance of it to the embedded one.