Today I Learned

Last updated Oct 24, 2023 Edit Source

• Houdini

The following is a compilation of all sorts of handy houdini tips & tricks. Most of them were shared in the #today-i-learned channel on the Think Procedural Discord Server. Do yourself a favor and check it out an scroll to the top of the thread to find some hidden secrets!

• Pressing 8 in the network view toggles wire auto connection on and off (very handy if you move nodes around and don’t want to mess up your setups)
• Drag a wire in the middle of an unconnected node to instantly wire up in- and output
• Drag & drop a camera node in the viewport to look through that camera
• You can save geometry of any node through the right click menu
• Use shortform search to find nodes:
  • aw -> Attribute Wrangle
  • om -> Object Merge
  • gd -> Group Delete
  • pv -> Point Velocity
  • hf -> Height Field
• if you capitalize node names they will be sorted on top in the tree view (useful when object merging stuff)

• Ctrl or Shift + Arrow Keys let’s you rotate / move views
• M enables first person movement with WASD, Shift to sprint, Ctrl to slowdown and Q / E to lift / descend
• Ctrl + Alt + S enters ‘Zen’ mode and removes most of the UI clutter

• you can import anything straight into geo nodes by using File>Import>Geometry. This is very useful to import alembics without having to create a geo node and an alembic node inside it first.

sources / further reading:

• Think Procedural Discord Server