Power User Tips Wiki

[Nerox]

I'm currently reading Houdini On The Spot by Craig Zerouni. I never bought it because I figured that it would be to basic, but since there a couple of copies at the SESI Toronto office, I thought well let's give it a shot. I must say I love it! For those who don't know what it's about, it stacked with very useful Houdini tips and tricks, +/- 300 pages of pure Houdini love ;-).

It has been released with Houdini 9 in mind but still very useful, so I started thinking about if it would make sense to come up with an update. I think from a publishers point of view it's unlikely that it will be updated any time soon.

Now the wiki part, I keep a document of my own handy houdini tricks. Simply because often I figure something out like a typical expression and 2 months later I would like to use it again but forgot what the exact beats were, it should be somewhere in a hip file which possibly could be archived, lost or what ever. Because I keep this document on docs.google.com I can always access it. I can imagine there are more people like me who keep a little notebook with neath tips and tricks.

What if we would share those tips and tricks? Houdini On The Spot has been written by a single guy, imagine what we could come up with as a community! You might say that the Odforce wiki would be the right place for this. Ultimately, when this really starts to come together I can even imagine that this can be linked or build-in to the Houdini help.

Personally I divide it in to subcategories like SOP's, DOP's, etc

So to start the discussion here is the premise (or is it thesis): As a community we should create decent way to share our tips and tricks in the wiki

[ikarus]

i dont think a wiki can do as much good as the giant library of example files that you can download from the forum, ive pretty much downloaded every file that i could get my hands on, even if it isn't relevant to me at the time.

i think it would be fantastic if we had some sort of filed repository of example files, adequately labeled and authored, available to for use.

[Marc]

Hey

As it happens I'm trying to find something to do that at the moment... What would be awesome would be a file repository system that integrated with the wiki (or vice versa). If anyone has seen anything like this around or even a website that does it successfully then please let me know. I'm not working at the moment, so I have time .

As for the wiki, it might be a good thing to expand this?:

http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/Gems

But yeah, this sounds like a great idea .

[Nerox]

This might sound a bit crazy, but what if we ask SESI to do it?

In a way that it's integrated in the help. I can imagine that SESI wouldn't like to open up there documentation, but that's not what I'm aiming for. What if SESI would allow users to upload user example files to a specific help card. From SESI's point of view there getting example files for free, and for us users it interesting because we have a place to share neat tips and tricks plus it is easy accessible.

Though there might be quality concern. My opinion on that is as long as it's very clear it's about user uploaded content and general Wike rules apply it should be doable, right?