Matthew Hendershot

Thanks for the info.

Yes– much more is possible at the object level.
But I want this functionality on the SOP node level–and don't really want to spawn nodes at obj level for a number of reasons.

The frustrating thing is that there's a nearly perfect solution right now in houdini. The right-mouse “Preview Window” is a nice stripped down viewport that displays the output of a single SOP node. I just cannot find a way to spawn one via python.

Also the UI “Hide Others” option is not part of the standard display options–and looking over SceneViewer and Viewport object methods–I'm not finding an equivalent (just to temporarily “clean up” the current (or spawned) viewport for asset browsing)…

My plan B is to just temporarily switch the output of my hda, and home on the new output. But it would be nice to force “hide others” at the same time…

The right-mouse “Preview Window” has some special properties that I'm finding difficult to replicate using a floatingPaneTab.

1. I'm pretty certain that a floatingPaneTab SceneViewer will only ever display nodes with their display flag set.
   
2. I can't find any way to script the “Hide Others” feature of the sceneViewer.
   

This could be a really great way to browse lightweight assets from an HDA.

Just having the ability to call up the existing Preview Window from python would be fantastic.

Anybody have workarounds?

Greetings from the future…

It appears that 16.5 has the hou.hipFile.importFBX() method.

I wish we could force the import within a specific subnet. But for now, the big advantage over using the hscript command is that this method returns the node object of the subnet created.

-m