Is there a way to make changes to the default “untitled” scene that loads when you first open Houdini? It's not a huge deal but I do find myself doing a lot of repetitive tasks beyond normal preferences to accommodate HToA and a couple of other workflow idiosyncrasies. Obviously, I could create and manually load a common HIP but I thought I'd see how lazy I can get.

Look for 123.cmd. You will find there name of the file which is called by this script to setup the default scene.

EDIT1: Don't modify this one. Make new one in your

HOME\houdiniX.XX\scripts


The easiest way to create custom setup in 123.cmd file is to create example scene in Houdini and then save it to 123.cmd file with a help of

opscript

command.

EDIT2: You can also create python version of this file called

123.py

but I don't know is there possibility to save setup of your scene to it as easily as with opscript command.

There are several ways to customize Houdini on load.

The most common is to use either a 123.cmd or 123.py file with hscrpt or python Houdini commands to configure Houdini to your liking on start-up. These are run every time you launch a new Houdini session

If you want to force load a setup every time you load a file either new or in session, you can create/edit a 456.cmd or 456.py file.

Steadicam
I do find myself doing a lot of repetitive tasks beyond normal preferences to accommodate HToA

I'd be interested to know more about those tediously repetitive tasks for HtoA, maybe I can do something about it to ease the pain.

I also do a lot of repetitive setup on the Mantra node every time. For instance, I want my tile size to be 48, not the default of 16. When I right-click there is a menu option to make the current value the new default. I tried that, but it does not seem to “stick”. When I open up Houdini again and create a new Mantra node the old value of 16 is still there.

It would be nice if Houdini could de-couple preferences from the UI kind of like the way Blender does it. If I setup a Display option Houdini warns me “Hey this really does not work, if you load a new scene you are going to get that scene's settings”. In Blender there is an option called “Load UI” which is on by default giving it a similar functionality to what Houdini does now. But you can uncheck the “Load UI” and not inherit some other users values for a UI but still load the file into your UI setup.

Enivob
… When I right-click there is a menu option to make the current value the new default. I tried that, but it does not seem to “stick”. When I open up Houdini again and create a new Mantra node the old value of 16 is still there…

Have you tried to setup you node and then go to Gear menu and pick “Save As Permanent Defaults”?

People here mention that this "can be done" by customizing 123.cmd, but does anyone know what the code would look to if I wanted to load "my_startup_file.hip" and not "untitled.hip" on startup?