March 2019

After importing FBX files, hip files are getting very large. To avoid saving all geometry for every scene it makes sense to save the data to disk. For 3-4 objects it’s no big deal to do this by hand, but when dealing with hundreds of objects, this is getting annoying. Here is a small snipped, that reads the current houdini selection and exports bgeo.sc files to $HIP/geo/`opname(“..”)`/`opname(“..”)`.bgeo.sc. This is really the basic approach without any versioning, it gives you a good starting point how to set this up.

import hou  
oSelection = hou.selectedItems()

if oSelection == 0:
    print "nothing is selected"
else:
    for oSelectedNode in oSelection:
        print oSelectedNode.name()
        c = oSelectedNode.children()
        for n in c:
            p = n.path()
            node = hou.node(p)
            type = hou.nodeFlag.Render
            flag = node.isGenericFlagSet(type)
            if flag == 1:
                oFlaggedNode = n
                #print (p + " Render Flag is " + str(flag))
        oNewROPNode = oSelectedNode.createNode("rop_geometry")
        oNewROPNode.setInput(0, oFlaggedNode )
        oNewROPNode.parm("sopoutput").set('$HIP/geo/`opname("..")`/`opname("..")`.bgeo.sc')
        oNewROPNode.render()
        oNewFileNode = oSelectedNode.createNode("file")
        oNewFileNode.parm("file").set('$HIP/geo/`opname("..")`/`opname("..")`.bgeo.sc')
        oNewFileNode.setDisplayFlag(True)
        oNewFileNode.setRenderFlag(True)
        c = oSelectedNode.children()
        for n in c:
            p = n.path()
            node = hou.node(p)
            type = hou.nodeFlag.Render
            flag = node.isGenericFlagSet(type)
            if flag == 0:
                n.destroy()