Hi,


Is it possible to extract node presets to an ascii format? (I'm looking for something similar along the lines of hexpand/hcollapse, which does the same for .hip files, or hotl for .otl files).

This would be very useful – it would allow merging of preset files, storing them in a git repo in ascii format, etc.

Any ideas are much appreciated


imre

hey riviera, have you tried saving a preset from the ear menu in the parameter window? this saves an IDX file which is “kinda” of ascii

If not, writing a python node or script that exports a preset as XML is actually pretty simple using python minidom.

grayOlorin
hey riviera, have you tried saving a preset from the ear menu in the parameter window? this saves an IDX file which is “kinda” of ascii

If not, writing a python node or script that exports a preset as XML is actually pretty simple using python minidom.

Well, the “kinda” ascii won't do – it's the same ‘kinda’ as .hip files, but since I want to put these in a git repository, I'd need them to be full ascii.

Also, since all presets for a node are stored in a single file, it's kinda complicated to merge preset files between users.

Ah good point! I would definitly recommend the xml minidom route then

I used lxml etree for parsing data to xml.
Also because it has a c wrapper that is faster.

Good tutorial: http://lxml.de/tutorial.html [lxml.de]

Yeah IDX files are unfortunate You can use “hidx” to expand them but it looks like there is still uneditable stuff in there

I use “classic” Houdini presets, you need to set an env var first though:

HOUDINI_ENABLE_OLD_PRESETS = 1

This will let you save pure ascii files, though with minimal UI. I have RMB menu scripts though that work around this.

Cheers,

Peter B

pbowmar
Yeah IDX files are unfortunate You can use “hidx” to expand them but it looks like there is still uneditable stuff in there

Not for me, so far – all seems proper ascii. I don't know how I missed this command. Thanks!


imre

I had to look into this recently and remembered this post.

The non-classic presets are stored in an index file (binary) which can be expanded and collapsed to a directory structure with ‘hidx’. The expanded “Permanent Defaults” file contains a mix of ASCII and binary data. Most of it ASCII except for the portion after ‘opspareparmdef’ which is a CPIO packet similar to hip file format.

So to edit anything in that CPIO you will need to convert it to plain text. It's a pain but doable:
- do ‘hotl -x tmpdir mypresets.idx’
- filter or retrieve the portion of the “tmpdir/Permanent Defaults” file starting on the line after ‘opspareparmdef’ and ending before ‘opchannels’ tokens, and save it into a tmp.cpio file
- run ‘hcpio -i < tmp.cpio’ which writes “opspareparmdef” text file
- edit this text file as you wish
- run ‘echo “opspareparmdef” | hcpio -o -O opspareparmdef.new.cpio’
- replace the portion of the “tmp/Permanent Defaults” file between ‘opspareparmdef’ and ‘opchannels’ with the contents of “opspareparmdef.new.cpio” file
- do ‘hotl -c tmpdir mypresets.idx’ to finally arrive at edited presets

Hopefully the next work iteration on presets will make this kind of thing painless.

Woo. Well at least it's do-able Thanks Rafal for that.