Howdy all,

We've got an in-house mesh cache format here that I'm trying to hook into Houdini. I've got it reading static caches just fine, but I can't figure out a way of passing in the frame number from the File SOP. The files I'm reading have all the per-frame data encapsulated in the one file, so I want to keep re-reading the same file, just passing in a different frame number each time.

My first thought was to append a frame number in the File SOP, and strip it off in the reader, so something like "myfile..bob“ would end up reading frame 5 of ”myfile.bob“. But there seems to be some checking going on up front my houdini, and if the specified file doesn't exist, the reader isn't even called.

Passing along a separate argument (e.g. ”myfile.bob 5") doesn't seem to work either, presumably for the same reason.

Anyone have a suggestion here? How do you pass other arguments to a custom file reader?

AC.