Tyler Britton

We are working in a Linux environment, and used to have our HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR located on in our /home/DOMAIN/USER/ folder on a per machine level. We just changed it so that each user has it now has it in their user folder on the network, where as before it was on that specific machine. This was done by changing the HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR in the 123.py script on startup.


This somewhat works, we get a new user folder for each version on our network, located at /mnt/warehouse6/cask1/users/USER/, and it seems to use what is put in there. $HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR also returns the correct folder if you print it inside Houdini.

However, the older default /home/DOMAIN/USER/ prefs folder is still being created and used when Houdini starts up, even though I am changing the prefs directory in the startup script.
Is there something else that I need to change? I would think altering it in the 123.py would disregard the older default location that Houdini sets up.

I am trying to setup a crowd sim where each agent can fire a weapon depending on their state, and when they fire it create a particle which would travel and ideally hit either a wall and die or another agent a trigger them into a ragdoll. I am fairly new to crowds but I got the particles triggering the ragdoll down, I am just trying to find the best approach for some of the other requirements.

#1. Controlling when each agent would fire their weapon.
I was thinking of parenting a grid at the muzzle of each gun and add that as a layer to the agents. I am doing that for the gun, but the grid would track the transforms for where the the weapon projectile would start. I would also add some type of parameter on those grid for the rate of fire, then limit that animation to specific states so the weapons are not firing all of the time.


#2. Emitting a particle for each weapon fire
The muzzle grids from #1 would then be unpacked and used as a point emitter within the same dop network as the agents. The problem with this is that I am having trouble singling out the muzzle grid I added without unpacking the agent every frame, which is not desired.

If anyone has any better direction on this please let me know. Again I am pretty new to crowds and would love to know a better way to do this.

I have a crowd sim where I am transitioning between different states which have different clips.
STATE_ADVANCE (clip_run)
STATE_ATTACK (clip_firing, clip_run, clip_prone)
STATE_RETREAT (clip_runbackwards, clip_die)

I have it setup where I can easily switch between different STATES using the crowd transition sop, that works well.
However I was wondering if once an agent transitions into STATE_ATTACK, that they randomly then transition between the three clips that I have for that state (clip_firing, clip_run, clip_prone). The Idea is that I have a bunch of troops advancing, once they get within a certain region they start attacking, however I don't want them just stuck on their initial ATTACK animation clip, I want them to randomly switch between them. I could setup each clip as a state, but I was trying to not have to do that since it will start to complicate my setup with once I start adding more ATTACK clips.