Houdini Edit

[Bridget Peral]

Max needs an unify Node Editor where we can see, connect and edit everything. In this node editor we should be able to edit materials, particles, objects with their modifiers and controllers, hierarchy, constrains, ik, wires, expressions, environment variables...

We need something like this. The Schematic View of 3ds Max as a relationship editor is a really bad experience, not useful at all, I never seen someone using it. At least check that! Please! Make 3ds Max Great again.

frank talk why new UI for Bifrost is to simple that if AD wanted put node base why they have to Overtime work for new UI (Bifrost) ? so they could show just a video for Bifrost then say its for future consideration update we working for nod base system and one workflow for all stuff

Is it possible to create a node system in 3ds max in which you can control different parameters of objects and modifiers? Something like the way it is now in the material editor or max graphs. There is a similar thing in Maya or Houdini. The blender is also developing a similar system. On the other hand, the modeling process itself should work without nodes, because in the same Houdini the main emphasis is on this procedural modeling and picking 10 parameters in each node spending all the time or most of it is also not very convenient. In the same May, the node system was made conveniently, I might have moved there, but there I personally do not like working with uv scan in 3ds max, it is more convenient and the metric does not work normally there. This is also better in 3ds max.

this is very needed, please start with a universal node editor it don't have to be perfect from the beginning just start with something like the modifier stack make the ability to use modifiers in a node editor (data channel modifier can be a start for this transition, or maybe it will become nodes in this new editor), then later on you can add more stuff to this editor like blender's geometry nodes it started much simpler than today!

I believe 3ds max already has most of the things needed to make this happen. It has the wire system, where you can not only connect most parameters with each other, including geometry with materials and so on - but you can also use operators and "math nodes" in the form of scripting so you can decide how the connecting should take place. It also has MCG and so on.

Hint on where to put your tool
Paul Ambrosiussen 9 days ago
You should make a Houdini package where you distribute all your functionality in!
How you call on your functionality highly depends on where you expose it
Does it affect nodes in network editor? OPmenu.
Does it create things in your viewport? Shelf. Etc etc

Like a lot of Houdini things its a good idea hidden by a slightly obscure interface, this'll try and clear it all up. I compare this a lot to maya references as that's the only comparison point I have, and most people in 3d understand them. If you don't, well.. tough. ?

A Houdini Digital Asset is like a maya reference. You export a chunk of a hip to an external file (eg c:/projects/library/coolthing.hda), now those nodes live somewhere else on disk, and you can bring them into your hip like a reference.

Once you realise that all an HDA is a bunch of nodes saved together on disk, it all becomes a lot easier to understand. It's also worth noting how many native Houdini nodes are HDAs. The clue is to look for the padlock icon next to the node. If you see it, that's an HDA, and you can dive inside to see how the sausage gets made.

In maya reference terms red means you might've made reference edits, gray means you've made no changes. If you dive inside the hda when the padlock is gray you'll see the nodes inside are dimmed; you're literally locked out of making edits.

If you want to make changes you can go back to the top of the hda, r.click and choose Allow editing of contents. The padlock goes red, dive inside and it no longer dimmed, you can edit away. Any changes you make are stored in the hip, the equivalent of making reference edits in maya. Like maya, the original hda (the reference) is untouched. If you were to bring in another copy of the hda, it wouldn't have those edits (the equivalent of referencing the same file twice, the second won't have the reference edits of the first).

To save your changes to the hda on disk, right click on the hda and choose Save node type. That's it. Those changes are now in the hda on disk. That's the equivalent in Maya of opening a second maya, loading the reference, copying your changes into there and saving.

To do the equivalent of a 'delete reference edits', ie make it match exactly to the state of the hda on disk, r.click again and choose Match current definition. The padlock goes gray and locked, if you go inside you can see its all dimmed, but should now show that the changes you saved are now part of the hda rather than of the hip.

My current job has a couple of interesting contraints. Hip files need to be run In The Cloud, and ideally run as standalone as possible. That means minimal environment variables, minimal fixed locations for libraries or assets, just the hip and what the hip might need in subfolders.

We also need multiple people working on a single file at once, using github to manage our files. That meant monolithic hip files were becoming an issue, because really only one person can work on it at once. We've tried using the diff tools, but they fell apart on big files, especially if you have things like stash nodes and frozen nodes.

Splitting work up into HDA's would be ideal, but the assumption is you load all your HDAs at houdini startup, and use environment variables to say where those HDAs will be found, which breaks our first requirement.

To simulate this I have 2 houdini's open; the one on the left is editing a hda, the one on the right is using it in a shot. You can see that I've changed some of the parameters in the right, but its still a locked hda, so the innards are the same as the hda on disk.

No, the right no longer updates. Once you unlock an HDA in a shot it loses its connection to the HDA on disk. If you want to get back in sync you r.click on the hda and choose 'match current definition'.

But what if the artist wants to update the HDA and keep the changes they've made? Unfortunately you can't. There's no built in diff/merge style workflows presented to the end user, so if you go off and do your own thing to an hda, the only way to inherits to the hde on disk is to reset any change you have made.

Once you start getting tricky you might start making bigger HDAs out of other HDAs. Be careful! If you update those smaller HDAs on disk, they won't be automatically updated in the bigger HDAs. You need to manually open the bigger HDA, update those components inside, save.

I mentioned before that there's no equivalent to the Maya Reference Editor window. Well that's a lie, of course there's something, but it serves a different purpose, and helps to point out an important difference between Maya references and HDAs.

Window -> Asset Manager will bring up a list of HDAs, but note that its not just HDAs in the current hip, its all the HDAs Houdini knows about. All the ones as part of the sidefx install, ones in your home folder, ones embedded in the hip, ones in your pipeline, EVERYTHING.

This implies that HDAs aren't really just 'external .ma's linked to the current .ma' like references are. A better analogy is Maya's plugin editor; deformers and tools that are part of your session to get stuff done.

Another interesting feature of the HDA editor is that you can have multiple versions of the same HDA in different places, you can locate them and swap between them. If you want to swap between them more directly you can expose a dropdown on HDAs to choose between definitions. From that Asset Manager move to the 'Configuration' tab, and at the bottom for Asset Bar choose Display Menu of All Definitions. This can be really handy when you're trying to track down versions of files, or which HDA you're using.

Remi Pierre had the answer here. Unlock and change values as before, but now r.click on the HDA and select 'Type Properties'. Now select all the parameters in the view, r.click, 'Copy defaults from node'. Accept, save node type, match definition, try making a new HDA, the values will be correct. Thanks Remi!

The joys of knowing clever people. No sooner had I posted this than Jeffy from Sidefx suggested an even easier way; the gear menu in the same interface has the same option, but will implicitly work for all the parameters, so you don't need to select them all. Cheers Jeffy!

You should see that it's using an opmenu script to populate the menu, but the path to the font sop is incorrect. When you drag the parameter into the HDA it will bring most of the stuff over, but it doesn't fix this path.

There's cases where the default locked state, or even the fact that the nodes are referenced back to an hda on disk can get in the way. Say you make a bunch of nodes to define a shot template with camera, lights, rops etc. You can wrap this up as a hda. Not only should it be unlocked on creation, because you expect artists to immediately dive in, you don't want them to accidentally run 'match current definition' and destroy all their work.

Save content as locked, when disabled, will not look like a hda at all, its as if you made some nodes, put them in a subnet, promoted some parameters. While it still knows its an hda (the asset bar will still know where it comes from), you can't match definition, its more of a template setup.

A third option which sidefx use more and more is dive targets. You can mark a subnet within your hda as available for editing, but leave the rest of it locked. Things like the vellum sop solver do this, so you have a region where you can put your own custom forces, but the boilerplate of setting up the sim is locked and safe.

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