l3g3nd

That's just what we do but I really don't know a better option.

If the artist has the display sop set on a node that is expensive to cook I don't know any other way of preventing cooking except set the scene update to manual on save.

Hopefully someone else will reply with a smarter idea

This has been a pet peeve of mine as well….houdini cooking upon loading scene.
The problem is sometimes even at frame 1 houdini can cook depends on what's displayed.

What we do is, we have a custom scene save button that forces the update mode to be manual. Some artists hate it some don't really care since they are usually in manual anyways lol

Tough one to solve really.

Edit. Maybe you can do a callback when the scene is loaded to go to frame 1 via python? I'm not sure if there's a onSceneLoaded() event…

Or have a custom scene save that sets the timeline to frame 1 then saves.

Just looking here.
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini13.0/hom/hou/hipFile#load [sidefx.com]

Yeah its a bit small atm. However we are able to crank out shots quite efficiently. Work smarter not harder