Houdini PDG, passing env vars to tasks on Farm

[Ahmed_Hindy]

hi all,
we are using PDG plugin next to the Houdini plugin on farm. for the regular plugin, we can pass environment variables easily and it gets picked on other render nodes.
I want to do the same thing for PDG in TOPs, for example I want to pass %PATH% and %HOUDINI_PATH% variables for Arnold HtoA so we can render Arnold jobs on farm without having to set the vars locally on each node. can someone who tried this before tell me how to do it?

[anthonygelatka]

Custom environment copy

Custom Environment Copy from Thinkbox GitHub issues

Hi All, Is anyone using the CustomEnvironmentCopy from the github repo? It’s been a while since it’s been updated but assume it should be working ok? Works great for Maya & Houdini but C4D seems to pull all the local user env vars, so always looks for the local tmp folders of the user who submitted the job (which obviously don’t exist on the farm) I’ve added all the unwated env vars used on the local machine to the block list but not sure if C4D is overriding these somehow?

I think the links to the github in that thread work, and I also think I saw these scripts being updated to work with latest py3 too.

I don’t think this works with path translation though, but a bit of work on the scripts and I’m sure it could be possible.

[Ahmed_Hindy]

ok I saw the github repo and your posts but I still have no idea how to install/ run it at all.
any help would be appreciated

[anthonygelatka]

Download the folder and place it in your repository under custom/events

Then in Super/Power User mode in Deadline go to ‘Configure Events’

In here you can select the CustomEnvironmentCopy and add the env vars you want

(I boosted the Font for my large monitor but the menus don’t display correctly!)

You’ll need to have this set to ‘enabled’ and also make the modifications shown in the other post to include the env vars rather than ignore them

[Ahmed_Hindy]

I read the py file, this doesnt seems like something for PDG. it looks like it’s for regular Houdini plugin submission.
PDG on submission creates the plugin locally and copies it to the rest of farm nodes. there are no settings for it on the Deadline Monitor.

[anthonygelatka]

@Ahmed_Hindy

for example I want to pass %PATH% and %HOUDINI_PATH% variables for Arnold Ht

It’s an ‘Event’, it reads the env vars set at submission time and passes them over to the job rendering, if you have OCIO, HOUDINI_PACKAGES_DIR, HOUDINI_PATH, etc set in here it will pass these things over. you can pick which ones get passed over.

[Ahmed_Hindy]

I solved it by passing ‘$HOUDINI_PACKAGE_DIR’ env var which looks for another directory containing all jsons I need to setup an env for the farm.

thanks for the help