I am suprised that houdini has this awesome preflight tool that tells you where all files related to a scene are but it has no way to collect them into a different folder?

I suspect it may be tricky to do this in a foolproof, trustable fashion. It's not about moving the files - that's easy enough - it's about ensuring all the references to those files still work. For example, it's a common workflow to use a wrangle to create (say) instancepath attributes on points, but if Houdini were to collect those referenced files into another folder, it'd have to do some pretty crazy analysis of your VEX code to make sure the folder part of the string got updated without upsetting anything else.

Keeping your assets organised is gonna be up to you, I'm afraid. I agree it's a pain sometimes: while $HIP and $JOB let you keep stuff together, I make a lot of use of $HSITE for assets shared across projects, and if I ever wanted to send stuff to an external render farm, I'd have to copy those site files over and update the references manually. Can't see an easy way round it though

howiem
I suspect it may be tricky to do this in a foolproof, trustable fashion. It's not about moving the files - that's easy enough - it's about ensuring all the references to those files still work. For example, it's a common workflow to use a wrangle to create (say) instancepath attributes on points, but if Houdini were to collect those referenced files into another folder, it'd have to do some pretty crazy analysis of your VEX code to make sure the folder part of the string got updated without upsetting anything else.

Fair enough. Houdini is so open that there are always creative ways to break it, but a simple extra functionality to the already existing Pre-flight function is totally achievable, and probably welcomed by a lot of people.