AFAIK the default workflow of creating new version of assets is to duplicate the asset first with a new version in its name and then do the changes.

This workflow however might be a bit counter-productive as people often do many experimental changes first and just then see if they will make it into newer version or not.

I used this workflow for some time until a friend at the university pointed it out that it of course does not make a sense and that it should be the other way around – do modification first and if satisfied, save as a new version.

This sparked my interest and as it turns out the tool to do exactly this thing can be easily and seamlessly added into Houdini with use of couple of Houdini HOM methods.

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COMMENTS

  • Andrew Graham 5 years, 5 months ago  | 

    This is one of the most usefull HDA workflow enhancers I've encountered. I think side fx should consider making this canonical, with the added possibility to have save as version in the otl parameter dialog itself.

    in production, if you have good version control an otl shouldn't ever really be modified in place if its prior state can't be protected, and this workflow really helps with that.

  • howitzer99 4 years, 8 months ago  | 

    I stumbled-upon this post again when I couldn't find the "Save New Version" menu in Houdini 18. After installing this OPmenu.xml script in H17 many moons ago, I forgot that this wasn't a built-in tool in base Houdini.

    I completely agree that this should be canonical. Being able to both see which version of an HDA is being used, and being able to easily save a new version, is extremely valuable when developing HDA's. While there is a version box in H18, I find this method works better for me in my current workflow.

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