Is there a way to collect files like in after effects?

I'm sure you could collect file dependecies with a script, but the best practice is to have all your dependencies in Houdini point to $JOB or another arbitrary variable. If $JOB is set to for example /projects/Houdini/mycoolshit all the files needed will be in /mycoolshit making it simple to back up or move. In the render menu you can run Pre-Flight Scene to check that all dependencies are relative to $JOB or $HIP

Have a look at Render > Pre-Flight Scene

Hi, I've bumped in to this thread look for the information on how to collect files in Houdini and since you guys got already here I have to ask:

is there something build in Houdini that automatically collect the files to a directory?

Not like AFX and traversing the whole scene is certainly not trivial so as stated, your friend is the Pre-Flight and work in a way that makes things easy to port from the start.

This should be a good tool to put together… mmm… will have to think about it.

It seems to me that it is possible for a Houdinian to make such a tool, but there are several reasons that will complicate the development.

1) Contexts. Go through all the contexts of Houdini and see what there is easy. And how to solve the problem when different nodes will refer to a cache with the same name, but are in different directories?

2) Slow copying of data. Imagine how many will take the collection of files of a large project, where there will be many gigabyte caches of data simulation, textures, models and other. But this can last for hours and even days.

And to compare still with programs that do not deal with such heavy calculations is not entirely correct.

Try this script
https://github.com/Aeoll/HipCollector [github.com]

IS there a version that works with usd referenced files ?

The Labs archive project

sepu
The Labs archive project

Interesting. I wasn't aware of this TOP, so thanks for mentioning it.

One question though. I heavily rely on symlinks pointing to shared resource files located outside of $JOBhierarchy. Will this TOP follow symlinks and replace them with target files before archiving the project? Documentation doesn't mention it.