Hi Everyone,
I've been developing some tools primarily aimed at improving workflows in an efficient manner. ODTools for Houdini is an ever growing collection of tools/HDAs that I have been working and improving on for a while in the shadows, spreading via word of mouth, but I feel its time to let people know about them officially.
Some of the highlights of the tools are as follows (there's currently about 70 tools and more being added all the time, so I am just listing some of them and you can look up a full list on the product page: OD Tools for Houdini [origamidigital.com]:
- Drag and Drop support Video Overview [vimeo.com] (older video, much improved now but shows the basics)
- Obj to Lops - provides a quick way to get obj level nodes into Solaris. Either via sop/scene import or by creating .usd files and linking those on the fly. Just select/multiselect your nodes and let it go.
- Snippet Manager Video Overview [vimeo.com] - A simple way to manage your wrangles and other data.
- Asset Library Manager - Manage Your Texture/Object/HDA/Node Libraries, automatic thumbnail creation, etc
- TheGrove 3D Import - allows you to quickly import trees generated by the Blender plugin
- Octane QuickSetup / Quick Material. Video Overview 1 [vimeo.com] Video Overview 2 [vimeo.com] - a very fast and efficient way to work with octane.
- Viewport Material Picker Video Overview [vimeo.com] - Lets you click on anything in the viewport, and opens up a floating window to the underlying material.
- Project Selector Video Overview [vimeo.com] - A very simple pipeline tool to help people get organized, especially when you work together remotely with others.
- Light Placer Video Overview [vimeo.com] - allows you to quickly create lights based on reflection/diffuse angle on an object in the viewport
- Lots of tools, dealing with Materials, their setup, their conversion (Octane, Redshift, 3Delight, Renderman, VRay and Arnold) supported, some of them highlighted here six additions [vimeo.com]
- Reference Manager - gives you a reference to all external files, lets you localize them and update.
And many more, please refer to the product page. As I am updating, I'll post more videos here.
One of the use cases for common issues solved by these tools can be found here:
Object Library to HDA - Part 1 [vimeo.com]
Object Library to HDA - Part 2 [vimeo.com]
Object Library to HDA - Part 3 [vimeo.com]
Lastly, Thanks to all the SideFX people, their support team, their developers, the SideFX Labs team, their incredibly quick bug fixes and just, for creating the most awesome package I have used in my career.
Also a continued thanks to all the customers supporting ODTools for Houdini, making suggestions, coming up with sometimes crazy stuff but always being awesome.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy!
Oliver