Custom Houdini Plugin Param Configuration

Deadline
1

Hi,

I’ve made some changes to the Houdini submitter (submission/Houdini) & plugin (plugins/Houdini).

The original code is unaltered - I’ve duplicated to custom/submission/Houdini and custom/plugins/Houdini and made all changes there. This seems to work fine and the Deadline ROP uses the custom plugin correctly when submissions are made.

However I’ve noticed the param entry under Tools > Configure Plugins > Houdini doesn’t appear to have any affect on the custom Houdini plugin?

What is the correct way to configure a custom plugin which is overriding one of the default ones?

Can the plugin be renamed to something other than ‘Houdini’ while still replacing the original?

Thanks

2

Hi,

Just checking: Did you copy all the files from plugins/Houdini to custom/plugins/Houdini?

custom/plugins/Houdini/
├── Houdini.ico
├── Houdini.options
├── Houdini.param
├── Houdini.py
└── hrender_dl.py

Can you give an example of how the param file doesn’t affect the custom Houdini plugin? Like the executable paths are not updated or ?

1 Like
3

Reviving this thread as I posted right before an extended leave.

Yes everything was copied to the location you have suggested.

In the Houdini.param file there is an option to ‘Enable Path Mapping’ which is “True” by default in the original Houdini plugin. I needed to turn this off as it was breaking one of our cache tools, so I went to Tools > Configure Plugins > Houdini and changed this setting to “False”, then synchronized the plugins.

In was expecting this to work since custom/Houdini takes precendence over the default Houdini plugin, but it didn’t and I spent a while debugging.

In the end I had to go the custom/plugins/Houdini/Houdini.param and change the default from True → False manually for it to work, which presumably means a custom Houdini plugin cannot be altered with the usual Configure Plugins UI?

4

Maybe one of the Deadline support staff can add to this thread. I think that the custom param file is used as plugin defaults that are then stored in the deadline database.

However, that being said, toggling from True to False for the “Enable Path Mapping” should have been saved in the db. We’re still on 10.3.x and Configure → plugins works for us. Not sure how easy it would be to query the database to find out if your changes were saved.

After you made changes via UI, did you submit / re-submit as a new job? I think just re-queing it doesn’t grab the updated plugin info.