Quick update and help needed

[Andy Nicholas]

Hi guys,

Just thought I'd post a quick update and I also have a request for your help.

First, the request for help.. could I ask as many of you as possible to send me the output from your hconfig command line tools? I need to get a decent sample set of the variety I can expect in the real world of how people have their Houdini paths set up. You just need to follow these steps:

1. Open Houdini Terminal/Command Line
2. Type hconfig -ap > config.txt
3. Email the config.txt file you just created to me (andy at andynicholas dot com) and let me know what version of the OS you're running.

Anything supplied will be treated in the strictest of confidence and not copied or passed on in any way. This is purely so I can find a robust way of parsing the various path environment variables, so the more complicated the better! In particularly I need a default Houdini setup for the various Windows versions if anyone is using those. 

Thanks for your help!

So, what's been happening...

• Stable Noise was pretty well received with over 2000 views and 117 likes on the video. Seems pretty good considering it was a fairly dry topic to start a release on, and especially since it's not particularly Softimage focussed.

• I've been working on the next release which will feature Locations as the main component. Essentially it's the bundling together of two values (primitive ID and primitive intrinsic UV) into a structure and making that super easy to use for the artist. You can expect new SOPs for Get Closest Location, Attribute From Location, UV To Location, and a few others too. Things are coming on nicely and I'll hopefully be able to share more in the next month or so.

• As part of implementing Locations, I've also been beefing up Array support too. This was partly inspired by a conversation over email that I had with Pedro Santos (who recently joined the list, hi Pedro!). So you can look forward to some super useful tools for that.

• The last part of this release will be a VEX Unit Test node. With so many VEX functions being written in external files, having a way to test them all is incredibly useful. Especially because Houdini's aggressive caching of VEX means that you have to keep restarting Houdini to update the VEX #includes. This new node gets around that by directly calling vcc which lets you syntax check external files, as well as running your own unit tests based on geometry. Many bugs have been squashed due to this node already. It's pretty fully featured and as someone who's spending a lot of time writing VEX, I'm super excited about this one!

Right, that's it for now. As always, happy to receive feedback and requests if you have any ideas. 

Don't forget to send me the hconfig file when you get the chance!

Cheers,

Andy