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Houdini's Workflow


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Hello there,

I'm a newbie to Houdini. Here are my questions:

How do you guys set a "workspace" that would organize a project. e.g the scene files, images, shaders...and so on.

I found that Houdini creates a "houdini" folder in my account's TEMP folder. Can I change that path of it to some where else?

Thank you in advance.

codenamejyn.2004

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Actually, you can set up a whole bunch of environment variables, one for your render directory, one for shaders, one for OTL's, etc, and make them relative to your current $HIP directory. If you open a console or terminal or whatever, and launch Houdini from within your project's hip directory, it makes things a bit easier.

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As a bit of a hangover from the PRISMS days, you can set up a project structure parallel to $HIP with directories like:

project/jason/hip -for projects

project/jason/geo -for geometry stills and sequences

project/jason/scripts -for scripts pertaining to this project/shot

project/jason/otl - for OTLs for this project

project/jason/tex - for texturemaps and reference pictures

project/jason/chan -for chan files

project/jason/pic - for rendered images

PRISMS used to have a $JOB variable and a facility in the software to easily create these directories, but since then Houdini has become more free-form.

I'd suggest that you also keep a "global" project dir around of the same structure somewhere to house your resources that you want to keep online and shared amongst projects. Lets call it "common".

In larger projects, you might want to consider the splitting up into more levels, like common/facility, show, sequence and/or team, shot, user, private/personal. You can use Houdini path traversal to help with priorities with this - i.e., a project level modification should override a common definition (of the same name).

Cheers,

Jasonmmm

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Right; its very powerful because it allows you to override any of the files in the distribution ($HFS) without having to touch the distribution at all. Its a good way to set up your custom environment. This custom environment may contain/reference your "common" resource area.

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