Houdini HDAs and Nimble Studio

[dave 2]

Hi there,

I'm very new to Houdini, so I thought I'd reach out to the community to pick the brains of our Houdini experts out there.  I've been diving into HDAs a bit and trying to figure out a workflow for storing and accessing them that would work well on Nimble Studio.  One approach is to store all the HDAs in one library asset and then have each shot subscribe to that asset.  However, because that library would be copied to the cloud machine every time a new streaming session starts, as that library grows the launch time for each shot will get slower and slower and that's no good.

So, instead of that, I tried creating one asset per HDA and subscribing to only the assets that I need in each shot.  I also wrote a Python script to add the path to each subscribed HDA to $HOUDINI_OTLSCAN_PATH when Houdini launches.  That way the Houdini tab menu is already populated with the subscribed HDAs for easy access.

I think it's a pretty good solution, but I'd love some feedback from those with more Houdini experience.  I've written up my method as a knowledge base article here: How to Automatically Add Subscribed HDAs to Houdini's Tab Menu

Please check it out and post your thoughts!  Does this seem like a good solution?  How could it be improved?  Or is there a better solution that I'm not thinking of?

Thanks!