If you have comments / questions about the HDA Building webinar - you can post them here and Jeff will reply…


ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION:

In this presentation we will focus on Houdini Digital Asset or HDA construction from basics to in depth details. All live in Houdini. All the time building up HDAs to demonstrate all features.

HDAs are a powerful way to turn your clever networks in to a single operator that can be referenced millions of times by any numbrer of users. HDAs can be simple nodes with simple uses or complex nodes that do an entire effect.

The webinar will look at planning and design of networks for HDAs, making HDAs and deploying HDAs for single users or for entire facilities.

Customizing HDAs is a big part of the work. This requires an in-depth look at the Edit Operator Type Properties dialog as this is the key tool for tool construction.

Managing HDAs is also covered. HDAs are automatically added to context tab menus and you can install assets directly on the shelf.
You may have ten, hundreds or thousands of assets to manage in Houdini. You can have multiple assets inside a single .hda file will be discussed. There are command-line tools to help manage HDAs along with three key ways of configuring your enviornment. Versioning HDAs is also covered along with HDA diff'ing.

Finally examples of HDAs will be given for all the various network types including Objects, SOPs, ROPs, Materials, VOPs and more.

To answer an obvious question off the top - yes we recorded the session, and it will be posted in the next day or two, along with scene files Jeff used during the session. I'll send out the usual email notification when it's ready.

Video recording and scene files posted [sidefx.co]

Thank you for the webinar!

I found the section about creating handles especially interesting. So what would be the best way to create custom dynamic handles on a unknown/varying number of primitives? Eg. when creating multiple extrusions on a procedural city?



I hacked together a solution based on points but i am neither sure about bringing it up on asset level nor whether thats the ideal way to do it.

I have a similar question to the one above, where one HDA houses a number of HDA that all have their own transform handles (in a container that is made editable). I would like for the user to be able to select these embedded HDA's and transform them, but I don't know how I would achieve that via the HDA that houses them all. All the HDA's are Sop level….

I know this is really old, but I didn't see them go over ROP HDA's. Is there any other videos that go over those?