Marc-André Belzile

Thomas M
Hi everyone,

I’m trying to load my Houdini recipes from a custom Google Drive folder, but I can’t tell if Houdini is recognizing the setup. The Mops.json file in the packages folder is working fine; it’s just this custom directory that’s giving me trouble.

Here’s what I’m using:

json
Copy code
{
"HOUDINI_PATH": "j:/My Drive/Houdini_Recipes",
"env": [
{"HOUDINI_CUSTOM_RECIPE_DIR": "j:/My Drive/Houdini_Recipes"},
{"HOUDINI_CUSTOM_RECIPE_LIBRARY": "myrecipe"}
]
}
I’ve tried adjusting to forward slashes, but still no luck. Does anyone know if HOUDINI_CUSTOM_RECIPE_DIR is valid for loading recipes, or have advice on getting custom paths to work?

Thanks!

What is the issue exactly ?

j:/My Drive/Houdini_Recipes/otls/myrecipe.hda should be listed in the Recipe Manager unless the package is not loading for some reason.

Does j:/My Drive/Houdini_Recipes/otls/myrecipe.hda exist on disk ?

Hello,

If you encounter a rendering problem with python panels, it is likely due to an issue with Qt's WebEngine running on a system with a newer glibc version (i.e. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS). Basically, any panels that display Qt web content, such as the Python Panel Calendar example and the Python Panel error viewer, will not function out-of-the-box.

The workaround is to turn off sandboxing in Qt WebEngine's Chromium code by setting QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS='--no-sandbox' in the environment before launching Houdini. The reason why we do not set this environment variable automatically on Houdini startup is because there are inherent security risks with turning off sandboxing in Chromium:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/mac/sandbox_debugging.md [chromium.googlesource.com]

So turn off sandboxing at your own risk though we haven't encountered any issues thus far in-house when turning off sandboxing.

Note that newer Chromium versions, such as the one that ships in Qt 6, does not experience this problem. When we release Houdini with Qt 6 support, the problem will go away.

Also note that it is not feasible for us to backport a fix to Houdini's Qt 5 build.

Do you mean unloading redshift at runtime or to skip loading redshift on startup ? Unloading the redshift package at runtime is not possible yet, should be possible with the next 20.5 production build update (i.e. hou.ui.unloadPackage or with the package browser). However, unloading redshift will not unload the dso resources.

If you need to prevent redshift from loading on startup, you can modify your package to set HOUDINI_PATH conditionally with an array variable as documented [www.sidefx.com].