Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice on best practices in Houdini when joining a team. I'm interested mostly in things that advanced Houdini users would want juniors to know. Things like organization of the node graph, common naming techniques, etc.

Both positive skills to have, as well as things that may be annoying (like having a huge node graph with no arrangement or notes about how it works)

I've looked around online for this but mostly just found tutorials for beginners. I'm more interested in what common improvements or mistakes a junior might make within a production environment.

Thanks

Hi there,
not using $HIP file-locations but hardcoded file paths is definitely one of them.
Not useing sticky pads to explain things in the node tree.

The use of a null node as OUT_xxx is also quite common and i would strongly recommend it.

Doing things manually with a edit(poly)/Group node etc., that you can do in a procedural way.
Even if your result is only needed once (you never know!).

Not using an HDA where it could be used, instead of the same code copied over and over again.

Not setting up parameter/menus/ui… create an interface

just a few of the top of my head…

kind regards

Olaf

Some useful network-specific recommendations are available in the Houdini 15.5 docs, if you haven't seen them. Written by Ari “Particle Kabob” Danesh, I believe.

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/network/best_practices [sidefx.com]

Do you think “node as prefix” is still necessary in H16?

Konstantin Magnus
Do you think “node as prefix” is still necessary in H16?

I was going to comment to this end. I think the node type hint in 16 supersedes any need to embed this in the node name.

Thanks for all the good suggestions. And I hadn't seen that network-specific recommendations document before, that's good as well.

If there's any other good ideas, keep them coming.