How to refresh motionfx export references when they get outdated?

[magneto]

Hi,

 

I have a SOP that uses motionfx. They are in a geometry node called geo1, which is inside subnet1. SO everything works correctly. Then I cut geo1 and put it directly under obj, and motionfx stops working.

 

Is there a way to fix this? I updated motionfx nodes by removing subnet1/ but nothing changed.

 

I can't change the SOP parameter that uses motionfx because it just says "Overridden ...". There is no expression.

 

Is this a locked out thing in Houdini?

 

 

Thanks

[anim]

you need to fix Export Prefix as well

I assume that your chopnet was in geo1 as well and by cutting it out one level you probably need to change it from ../../../.. to ../../.. so that it again points to main object level from where the channel path is valid

or instead you can as well just change Export Prefix directly to /obj

Edited October 21, 2015 by anim

[magneto]

Thanks anim, it works. Shouldn't Houdini update these though? It's smart enough and doing these by hand costs a lot of debugging time even for experienced Houdini guys.

[anim]

if you cut something and paste Houdini doesn't assume what you probably want to do as the node from the clipboard is completely independent and any connections after pasting with objects already existing in the scene are made only when they are valid without any alteration, which makes sense and I don't think this is the case when you want it to be trying to be smart

 

however, if you extract content of your subnet, you want it to be smart which is yet not completely

while Houdini is in that case indeed smart enough to update Export Prefix as you would expect, it doesn't update names of the channels since they contain part of the path as well, so that would be some room for improvement, however it may be a bit tricky to track such dependencies as it really only depends on Export Prefix + Channel Names on the node that actually does the exporting, while channel names can be flowing in from various places

Edited October 22, 2015 by anim

[magneto]

Thanks anim, I was thinking that Houdini could store some meta data where the data is coming from, and even which Houdini instance. Because it already stores this kind of thing for whether the application is non-commercial or not.