Jakub Arnold

I've tried googling but can't find anything. The idea here being that instead of having to open up a .blend file in Blender, export it to say FBX/OBJ, and then add a FBX/OBJ import node, one could instead just have a "Blender Import Node", and give it the export parameters in Houdini, and it would then run the Blender export in the background.

Unity used to have something like this (https://docs.unity3d.com/560/Documentation/Manual/HOWTO-ImportObjectBlender.html), although it was removed because it lead to issues when people would share .blend files and have different versions of Blender installed, though that to me seems like just an implementation issue (e.g. no version check/pinning).

I wonder if anyone tried to do this or have any tips? The main thing I want to avoid is just the extra round trip and having to open blender, choose an export path, then choose the same path in Houdini and import, it'd be really nice if this could be done by just pointing Houdini at the .blend file.

I'm not sure if I understand the licensing correctly, but it seems that Houdini Indie license allows installing Houdini itself on two computers, and then I also see "Karma/Mantra tokens", which are 2 of each.

My question is, what kinds of setup does this allow in terms of using more than one computer to render? Can I actually use this to render on the two machines, since I'll be still "one user"?

Let's say I have an animation + some dynamics and I'm on frame 150 and the timeline/playbar is blue/simulated. I'm mainly treating the animation as a way to "get to a result" rather than have it animated, so I'm only interested in that specific frame.

Now say that I've changed some parameter that invalidates the simulation and the timeline turns orange.

Is there some button/hotkey I can press to re-simulate everything while staying on the current frame? What I've been doing until now is just scrub the timeline back and forth, but this sometimes causes unnecessary lag, especially if I have the renderer view open. It'd be nice if I could just tell Houdini "update everything up to this frame".