hello,

i am trying to render a scene with a simple pyrofx animation but unfortunately i only have 40Gb free on my C: drive (SSD) which is giving me a lot of problems in Houdini.

The file i'm working on is already saved on an external HDD that's why i don't understand this …

How can i tell Houdini to use another Hard drive for caching and temp files ?

right click on ‘my computer’ and then open ‘advanced system settings’. under the advanced tab, click environment variables. add a new variable called ‘HOUDINI_TEMP_DIR’ (no quotes) and set the value to the full path that you want houdini to use as a temp directory.

as far as your pyro sim goes, you can uncheck allow caching to disk on your dopnet to stop houdini from saving each frame to a tmp file.

if you have enough space, i would turn off allowing caching to disk and rop out just the geometry that you were going to render later. theres really no reason to save those sim files. the only reason you would need them, would be to restart the sim from the last frame that you've already simmed.. and for that you could use the explicit cache feature on the dopnet.

thx for the explanation, i'm coming from mac/linux so didn't know about the Windows environment variables … good to know.

i was already wondering about the use of these files and your explanation makes sense.

it's all working as i want it now