Problems compiling HDK assest in Houdini 17

[AME]

Hi everyone.

I encountered a few problems compiling HDK assets for Houdini 17 using cmake. Houdini seems unable to detect the assets even though they build just fine without error.  I use the community edition of visual studio 2015 update 3, and as far as I can tell, this is the correct version for Houdini 17  ?? When I try a simple SOP_Star example with Hcustom it does not work either as I get the error:

Failed to run C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\bin\Hostx86\x64\cl with error 2: The system cannot find the file specified.
This path does not seems to exist but when I use cmake it targets this dir:

This path exists in Visual studio 2017 but not in 2015.

However, when I try with cmake, it finds the compiler here:
CProgram Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0/VC/bin/x86_amd64/cl.exe

And creates the solution just fine. When I build the solution however, it does not show up in Houdini...

I have been using a similar procedure to compile assets with cmake for earlier versions of Houdini with no issues. Reading thourgh the HDK docs for comiling with cmake, they suggest parsing the argument  "Visual Studio 14 2017 Win64"   Does this version even exist ?  I have not been able to locate it... I have tried to compile with VS 2017 as well without luck. 

So do anyone know what the problem might be ? 

 

 

 

[Yannci]

First of all, the Visual Studio version is only indirectly connected to your problem. It's the toolchain/toolkit that has to match. The toolkit declares the compiler version. So you are able to use Visual Studio 2017 with the toolkit version 14. 

If your build finishes without errors the problems seems to be the library itself.

DLL's are normaly placed in your Users directory in the houdini17/dso folder. This directory is automatically appended to the HOUDINI_DSO_PATH. If think this directory is set in the CMake files shipping with the HDK (houdini/install/dir/toolkit/cmake). Haven't proofed it but seems reasonable.

If there is no .dll file, Houdini can't load it. If it's there, set the HOUDINI_DSO_ERROR variable to 1 or 2 and you will get output in the console during startup related to loaded libraries. Maybe there you find the reason and solution for your problem.
If your compiled library contains a custom operator, maybe one of the hook functions for registering the node in houdini is missing. Or maybe you are using the wrong compiler version. Then you should go to my first sentence and google around. But I would recommend that anyway.

Best
Yannic