fxnut

You're welcome! Sure, if I think of other benefits, I'll jot them down here.

Here's another… People don't always realise that galleries are not just for presets on a node. You can store subnets with multiple nodes inside in a gallery, so you can actually store complete FX setups if you like. Sure, you can do this with OTLs too, but with OTLs I always feel compelled to take the time to add some sort of nice interface that encapsulates the contents properly. Galleries are much less formal in that regard. You can just chuck anything inside that might be useful, and there's no pressure to make it look nice.

Worth saying that there's nothing stopping you using OTLs in a gallery type of workflow. Just add an OnCreate event to the OTL that would copy its contents to a subnet and then delete itself. Make sure you add a way to disable it (e.g. via an environment variable) otherwise you'll never be able to edit it again!

Hi Christian,
Galleries are great because they can be dropped into a scene and the nodes are just created.

It's fire and forget because with galleries there's no reference back to the original file, unlike with OTLs where they store the path to the original OTL definition and will update itself if it changes. This means that you can update the presets in the gallery as much as you like and there are never any worries about messing up someone's scene or having to maintain compatibility.

Galleries also appear in the Tool Palette and under the Parameter Pane gear icon which can be really handy.

OTLs are great for certain things, but galleries are fantastic for just storing those little snippets which you might update every now and again as you improve your workflow. If you're freelancing, you can take your galleries with you into each company and just drop them into your $HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR to use them in a new place. OTLs are a different story as you'd have to work them into whatever OTL management system is available to you (and you'd soon be in trouble if you used them from your home directory!)

That's off the top of my head… I dare say there are more

Cheers,
Andy

Hi guys,
Just stumbled across this thread. Lots of really good ideas here.

If you haven't seen it already, I've started an open source Houdini library called siLib. (At the moment, there are some nodes that allow you to apply noise in a way that's an improvement on Houdini's built in nodes, see http://vimeo.com/silib/stablenoise).

But now that that's finally out there, I'd like to start looking at streamlining some of the workflows in Houdini in a more “Softimage” way. Locations are one particular thing I have my eye on, and Todd's suggestion of implementing a UV to Location node is a great one. The idea would be not to just create a single node, but a suite of compatible nodes that add a whole new Location workflow to Houdini. I'm wondering if VOP structs might offer a way of making Locations a first class data type in Houdini which would be awesome. I still need to read up on it.

Anyway…like I said, there's already some great thoughts in this thread. It'd be good to discuss how we might develop them further and if there are any other key concepts that might be deserving of their own suite of nodes?

If anyone is interested in collaborating on any of this, do let me know. We also have a Google Group set up here: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/houdini-silib [groups.google.com]

Cheers,
Andy