qLib v0.1

[beeemtee]

Dear fellow Houdinistas!

We are pleased to announce that after more than two years of tinkering, qLib - our open source asset library for Houdini - has reached version 0.1 .

qLib is a library of more than a hundred more or less simple tools that we built during and beside production work as Houdini artists. When we started qLib we wanted to have a library that is documented, and actively developed and maintained. Later we wanted version control and decided to embrace the open source development model, so we put the whole library up to github and made it public. But now we want even more..

Now we want to invite all of you to test, to comment, to criticize, to report bugs, to help us to write better docs, to fix tools that doesn’t work as intended, to share your ideas and to share your assets that you find useful and that you have no problem with others finding it useful too.

We believe that Houdini has a wonderful user community with lots of clever and helpful member, so we hope that a project like qLib can focus that knowledge and wisdom into tools thus making every Houdini user’s life a little bit better. Even better..

The qLib team

Edited November 14, 2012 by beeemtee

[zarti]

count on me and my free time .. oc =)

respect !

..

Q > posts about qlib , should be made here ?

( if yes , id suggest for this thread to be moved into a more appropriate section on odforce )

.cheers

-- edit :

do the otls work on H11 ? ( ! )

Edited November 13, 2012 by zarti

[zarti]

..

-- edit :

do the otls work on H11 ? ( ! )

i mean i can fully load the qlib_version_0.0.30 excluding only two otls quoted below :

+-()(3)(13:10)-> hescape

Invalid operator type name: qLib::camera_frustrum_ql::1.0

Error: Couldn't add operator type Sop/qLib::camera_frustrum_ql::1.0

Invalid operator type name: qLib::curve_offset_ql::1.0

Error: Couldn't add operator type Sop/qLib::curve_offset_ql::1.0

.. while version qlib_0.1 on H11.1.388 cannot load any of otls .

i havent been following H12 and its changes so any comment wd help ..

.thanks

[beeemtee]

Thanks!

Yes, I think this topic could be the place for qLib related discussion since github doesn't provide forum functionality and qLib don't have a dedicated website yet.

If the odforce superiors think that it should be moved and/or renamed to reflect this I would be grateful if they would do this for us.

No. Unfortunately the current and upcoming releases won't support H11, since it uses the H12 only features of namespaces and asset versioning. It seems that those two assets (camera_frustrum_ql, and curve_offset_ql) already used the new naming scheme in v0.0.30 and thats the reason why H11 can not load them. More to that, we also depend on H12's new geometry engine features, like the more general handling of P and N attributes in VOP SOPs and the new attribcreate operator. This means that even assets that gets loaded to H11 may or may not work properly in H11.

To put it simply we currently don't have the resources to backport, to test and to maintain the assets under H11. It's not that it's not possible, so if there is big demand for this, we are happy to help someone who is motivated enough to do the job!

cheers

Mate

Edited November 13, 2012 by beeemtee

[riviera]

do the otls work on H11 ? ( ! )

As Mate said, at a certain point we agreed on not supporting anything pre-H12 any more (since this library is basically a "byproduct" of our working with Houdini, and at that point we all were using H12). This also allowed us to take advantage of new features like namespacing and to clean up some "H11-isms".

However since it's under version control it's entirely possible to get a local clone from github, and go back in the commit history to a point where the assets are not yet namespaced, and build and use that version. Although it won't be the latest stuff, it'll still give you considerable advantages over an out-of-the-box H11.

We started moving to namespaces between v0.0.28 and v0.0.29, so if you revert to somewhere there, you'll still be fine under H11, too. (Or just grab 0.0.28 from the downloads section.)

Imre

ps.: There's a note explaining qLib namespacing here, if interested: https://www.facebook.com/notes/qlib/introducing-h12-operator-namespaces-for-qlib/445701975463592

Edited November 13, 2012 by riviera

[McArt]

I really like some of your photos on FB...particularly the creapy spiderweb armit thingy. Scary and impressive at the same time.

Ever considered putting some of these together as an effect and posting one or two on orbolt?

[riviera]

I really like some of your photos on FB...particularly the creapy spiderweb armit thingy. Scary and impressive at the same time.

Ever considered putting some of these together as an effect and posting one or two on orbolt?

True enough-- those webs were generated using a spiderweb asset which would fit very nicely on Orbolt.

Jokes aside, the issue here is that it relies heavily on qLib assets, so I'm not sure how to proceed here. (Believe it or not but when Orbolt came out, we had a lengthy discussion on how to fit qLib into the Orbolt "way of things". Should we _move_ to orbolt? [no] Should we upload to orbolt? [yes] We have almost a hundred separate asset files, should we upload them one-by-one or should we collapse all our assets to a single .otl file? [neither] etc etc.) Needless to say, that discussion has _not_ reached its conclusions yet.

I'm not sure if it's allowed to upload assets to Orbolt that rely on other assets (that are freely available but not necessarily included). So we're not really sure on how to proceed -- although we would like the idea of uploading finished high-level assets to the store ("we" meaning everyone involved in qLib, me being the one who happened to build the web asset).

Imre

ps.: Btw, there's actually a spiderweb example scene in the qLib distro (not the same as the asset, though, but using a different approach)

Edited November 25, 2012 by riviera