Houdini - Startup Settings

April 20, 2020

The path to the user’s directory is stored in the environment variable HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR.

windows: ${HOME}\Documents\houdini18.0

Startup Scripts

Startup scripts are located in ${$HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR}/scripts.

When Houdini starts up, it sources for 123.py. This is executed only once when Houdini launches.

To execute a script on each scene load, Houdini sources for 456.py in the same scripts folder. This file is also executed when Houdini first launches the default untitled.hip.

Houdini sources for a file named MainMenuCommon.xml in your user preferences.

Here, we create a menu called My Custom Menu that has one subitem called New Camera which executes an inlined Python script.

<mainMenu>
    <menuBar>
        <subMenu id="mymenu1">
         <label>My Custom Menu</label>
          <insertAfter />
            <scriptItem id="myitem1">
                <label>New Camera</label>
                <scriptCode>
                    <![CDATA[
cam = hou.node("/obj").createNode("cam")
cam.parm("ty").set(2)
cam.parm("tz").set(3)
cam.parm("rx").set(-30)
                    ]]>
                </scriptCode>
        </subMenu>
    </menuBar>
</mainMenu>

Check here for more.

houdini

Startup Scripts

Creating a custom menu bar item