Creating Custom Shelf Buttons [SOLVED]

[GlennimusPrime]

I've been working with particles a lot recently and find myself continuously needing to open the 'display options' window to switch between displaying particles as points or discs (so I can visualise the pscale in viewport).

Would these two display options be something I could add to the shelf as two buttons? Display particles as points and display particles as discs?
I have no knowledge of how to create shelf buttons.

Edited October 7, 2021 by GlennimusPrime

[Fenolis]

"Display particles as Discs" is like copying a Primitive Circle/Sphere to Points. The Copy to Point SOP will assign pscale to primitive objects as well and should suit your visualization needs.

[GlennimusPrime]

Hi thanks @Fenolis I was hoping for an easy shelf button so I can quickly switch between the two ideally. I don't want to have to do the whole copy to points thing whenever I want to switch back and forth between points and discs. I know it's a quick setup to do that, but not ideal when doing this many times a day across multiple projects.

[jkunz07]

This code should work, you can make a new shelf tool by right clicking in any empty shelf space and then choose 'New Tool...'

 

You can paste this in the 'Script' tab:

if hou.ui.curDesktop().paneTabOfType(hou.paneTabType.SceneViewer).curViewport().settings().particleDisplayType() == hou.viewportParticleDisplay.Points:
    hou.ui.curDesktop().paneTabOfType(hou.paneTabType.SceneViewer).curViewport().settings().particleDisplayType(hou.viewportParticleDisplay.Discs)
else:
    hou.ui.curDesktop().paneTabOfType(hou.paneTabType.SceneViewer).curViewport().settings().particleDisplayType(hou.viewportParticleDisplay.Points)

 

[GlennimusPrime]

Incredible! Thank you so much @jkunz07 This has really made my day! I really do spend a lot of time jumping in and out of the preferences window all day long.

[Rence]

Hey John,

Thanks for the code. I have a question, does Houdini echo your actions somewhere? I remember in Softimage, every action I did, the python would echo that action, so it was easy to create scripts as you could grab the code from there.

Does Houdini have that kind of functionality?

6 hours ago, jkunz07 said:

This code should work, you can make a new shelf tool by right clicking in any empty shelf space and then choose 'New Tool...'

 

You can paste this in the 'Script' tab:

if hou.ui.curDesktop().paneTabOfType(hou.paneTabType.SceneViewer).curViewport().settings().particleDisplayType() == hou.viewportParticleDisplay.Points:
    hou.ui.curDesktop().paneTabOfType(hou.paneTabType.SceneViewer).curViewport().settings().particleDisplayType(hou.viewportParticleDisplay.Discs)
else:
    hou.ui.curDesktop().paneTabOfType(hou.paneTabType.SceneViewer).curViewport().settings().particleDisplayType(hou.viewportParticleDisplay.Points)

 

 

[jkunz07]

Houdini has some support for this kind of functionality via hscript

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/commands/commandecho.html

but in my experience it isn't too helpful as very little feedback of ui is actually echoed