New way to bring VTIs into Houdini

[Dan Wills]

Hi ReadyGang,

Over the last fairly big little-while I've been working on a simpler and better way to bring Ready VTI simulations into SideFX Houdini (and still running through OpenCL). This time 'round it is not a compiled HDK plugin with difficult link-dependencies: Instead it uses the (new) command-line ready binary 'rdy' and python code in the Digital Assets in Houdini, to bring everything across as text. It's not the fastest thing you've ever seen, but it works! :D

If you've been watching the repo you may have noticed a short while back that Tim and others kindly helped me to land the improvements I had made to the 'rdy' command that make this possible (lots of new flags that print sections of the VTI). Now I have also committed my Houdini Digital Assets (Non-Commercial) to the Ready repository. I really did mean to commit them in a branch (I'm still bit of a git/hub noob, apologies), but I accidentally put them on the trunk (gh-pages) and now I've updated them on trunk too. On reflection, because the files are binary (apart from the README.md) it seems like less of an issue, but if we end up having to delete them from trunk while we work something out, then so be it! I'm hopeful that this will not be necessary.

I'd absolutely love it if anyone who is interested could try to build 'rdy' from trunk and use the hdanc's and let me know if they run into any difficulties. I'm expecting some on non-Linux OSes.

The 'RD Template' Object HDA should unpack into something that works without the new 'rdy' command (and simulates my 3-reagent 'Tron-Light-Cycles' a GrayScott-with-History setup), but I'm also very interested whether anyone is able to build 'rdy' and load other (mainly Formula-mode) VTI files too. There's a reasonably detailed README.md in the Houdini/Scripts folder with instructions.

Cheers for any help getting this tested! I look forward to hopefully being able to make these new capabilities available to everyone in the next Ready release! :)

Have a choice one!

Dan