underscoreus 3 Posted January 22 (edited) Hi guys! I'm working on simplifying the setup in the computer lab at the school I work for. In that regard, I've been looking at making a centralized houdini.env file to put on our server. The best-case scenario would be if there is a variable I can enter into the local houdini.env file to tell it to look elsewhere for the rest of the config since this would give flexibility incase some local overrides are needed. Does such a variable exist? I've had a go trying to set PATH, HOUDINI_PATH, and HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR to a folder on my desktop as a test but neither seemed to give the result I wanted. Thanks for the read! Edited January 22 by underscoreus Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Stalkerx777 156 Posted January 29 In houdini.env: HOUDINI_PATH=$HFS/houdini:/path/to/my_tools where my_tools is a directory that has a structure which houdini recognises (i.e otls, scripts folders etc ) 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
underscoreus 3 Posted February 10 Sorry for the late reply, some other stuff came up, and had to put this project on ice for a week. I've gotten some of my setup working using a similar setup to what you suggested: (Note that I:\ is a networked drive) Quote HOUDINI_PACKAGE_DIR = "I:\_pipeline\_release\Houdini\18_0\packages" HOUDINI_PATH = "I:\_pipeline\_release\Houdini\18_0;&" This does solve the issue (or at least some of it?) detailed in the original post. However, while Houdini now reads my custom scripts/toolbars from this folder it is unable to read the .json package files I have there. My original plan was to have another houdini.env file in this server folder with all of the variables, but after testing and finding that to not work I moved onto the package approach. Testing my .json files locally inside ".../Documents/houdini18.0/packages" they work perfectly, but when I move them to "I:/_pipeline/_release/Houdini/18_0/packages" they don't get read and any plugins like Redshift or Arnold don't get added. If anyone's had success with this I'd love to hear from ya! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Stalkerx777 156 Posted February 11 Maybe this will help https://www.toadstorm.com/blog/?p=722 P.S. It might be much easier to write a wrapper script for launching Houdini, instead of struggling with .env and packages 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kiryha 65 Posted February 12 In case you need an example for the Houdini wrapper... 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
underscoreus 3 Posted February 15 Thanks for all of the replies! I ended up doing something kind of similar. Since we don't adhere to a very strict pipeline system here I'm afraid making a dedicated launch script would bring the problem where students don't use it to launch Houdini, instead using the Houdini shortcut on the desktop or the start/search. I ended up making a little function in the pythonrc.py file making sure that it copies all packages from the server to the local packages directory every time Houdini boots up, so far seems to work decently enough. And if anyone coming to this thread in the future wants an example of what I made, here it is: from shutil import copy2 import glob from os import makedirs from os import path from getpass import getuser versionNumber = hou.applicationVersionString()[0:-4] source = r"I:/_pipeline/_release/Houdini/" + versionNumber + r"/packages" dest = r"C:/Users/" + getuser() + r"/Documents/houdini" + versionNumber +r"/packages" srcfiles = glob.glob(source + r"/*.json") def wifmGetPackages(): if path.exists(dest) == False: makedirs(dest) try: for f in srcfiles: copy2(f,dest) except Exception: print("Error in loading packages") wifmGetPackages() Share this post Link to post Share on other sites