Hi everyone,

Is there a way to tell Houdini to start at frame 1 when we open a scene, or that he does not try to simulate to the frame we currently are (for example 15 or more). Sometimes it just doesn't want to go to frame 1 when we open the scene, it just try to simulate, and even by pressing esc Houdini never let me go to frame 1 UNTIL it has simulate the entire simulation…

Thanks,

Tom

This has been a pet peeve of mine as well….houdini cooking upon loading scene.
The problem is sometimes even at frame 1 houdini can cook depends on what's displayed.

What we do is, we have a custom scene save button that forces the update mode to be manual. Some artists hate it some don't really care since they are usually in manual anyways lol

Tough one to solve really.

Edit. Maybe you can do a callback when the scene is loaded to go to frame 1 via python? I'm not sure if there's a onSceneLoaded() event…

Or have a custom scene save that sets the timeline to frame 1 then saves.

Just looking here.
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini13.0/hom/hou/hipFile#load [sidefx.com]

You mean I must always set my scene in manual ?

That's just what we do but I really don't know a better option.

If the artist has the display sop set on a node that is expensive to cook I don't know any other way of preventing cooking except set the scene update to manual on save.

Hopefully someone else will reply with a smarter idea

Not sure whether this is common knowledge or not, but if you open a scene file with ‘houdini -n yourfile.hip’ it will force houdini into manual update mode, instead of auto-cooking.

Well, thanks for yours answers. I think that I really need to get myself more seriously into Python in Houdini (I'm just starting in Nuke)…

In your home directory, you could set a 456.cmd and do a “fcur 1” in it, or a 456.py and do a “hou.setFrame(1)” in it.

Houdini also supports Python versions of 123.cmd and 456.cmd, named 123.py and 456.py, respectively. Like 123.cmd, 123.py is invoked only when Houdini is started without a hip file. 456.py is invoked using the same rules as 456.cmd: Houdini runs it each time a file is loaded or the session is cleared.

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini13.0/hom/independent [sidefx.com]