Managing Shaders - Pipeline Question?

[smidur]

Hi,

I was wondering how people here manage shaders in production. I actually need to use H8, so unfortunately I cant use any new material features.

Say, I have several shaders and several people using them on different shots.

Problem is, that the shaders (vop prman) are going to be updated/changed/improved/broken while working on shots. Most logical to me would be to keep VOPs and SHOPs in one HDA. Unfortunately, I have experienced that when updating the asset, instances that are out of sync tend to break, also those that are rendering at the same time as changing the asset. Obviously I could also release a new shader every time I change something, but then I would probably end up with 80 versions at the end of the project, with each TD using a different version...

I would be very interested in any smart tricks, workflows, etc.

Thanks a lot

Martin

[Alanw]

I don't work in a studio unfortunately, but I think most use versioning control systems like SVN (Subversion) for this type of thing. This basically keeps code from being overwritten, and you'll have a repository of code with user submitted comments and version numbers. I have no idea how people use versioning control with Houdini in particular though. I've only read about this in regards to prman shaders.