SideFX EDU | Education Driven Utilities

SideFX EDU is a completely free, open-source toolset geared towards assisting Houdini Instructors with a variety of tasks commonly used when teaching Houdini. It is an all-inclusive toolset that spans the shelf, digital assets, custom desktops and scripts and more. The toolset is currently maintained by the SideFX Education and Training team. It also receives a lot of contributions from the always active Houdini instructors community. This toolset originated from the SideFX Labs toolset, which inspired us.

Installation

The following instructions are based on the Windows OS. Please adapt them accordingly to your OS.

Requirements

This toolset requires SideFX Labs to be installed. Please visit the SideFX Labs page for further instructions.

Using GitHub

Step 1. Click on the top-right Code button on the main page of this repository and select Download ZIP.

Or you can use this link :

https://github.com/sideeffects/SideFXEDU/archive/refs/heads/Development.zip

This allows you to get the latest update.

Step 2. Unzip it into a custom directory on your computer. Consider something accessible to all users.

Step 3. Inside this unzipped directory, copy the SideFXEDU.json template file to $HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR\packages.

Where $HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR is one of the following, depending on your operating system:

• %HOME%/houdiniX.Y/
• ~/Library/Preferences/houdini/X.Y/
• ~/houdiniX.Y/

and X.Y being the version of your Houdini installation.

Note: the default Houdini installation does not create a packages folder, so you might have to create it.

Open this template file with any text editor of your choice and replace "$HOUDINI_PACKAGE_DIR/sidefxedu" (line 8) with the path to your custom SideFXEDU directory from step 2. When Houdini launches, it relies on this file to discover the location of your SideFX EDU package.

Note: Step 3 needs to be done once for every major Houdini X.Y release. To update SideFX EDU for the same Houdini X.Y version, simply delete the existing contents of your custom SideFXEDU directory and unzip the updated package into that folder.

For more on how to manage Houdini packages, please visit here.

Check the installation is successful using the verification steps below.

Verification

If SideFX EDU is successfully installed, launch Houdini and you should see a Education menu on the top-left menu bar.

You should also be able to do the following:

1. Add the Education shelf to the shelf bar. For more information visit the Customize the shelf page.
2. At the object level (/obj), in the network view, press TAB then type EDU, you should see a list of tools starting with EDU prefix: EDU Camera Frustum, EDU Geometry Explainer...

Additional Information

Expanded HDAs

All of the HDAs are using the expanded format that was introduced in H16. This allows better diffing of the tools so you can see what our changes are doing and choose to integrate them back into your production.

Example Files

Instead of tying the examples as HDAs, we will be generating separate hip files that show how the tools should work in context. These can be found here.

Data Analytics

SideFX EDU optionally collects data about what tools are used through Google Analytics. We do this in order to focus our resources on the more active tools and therefore be able to help more people. This does not track any personal user data such as IP, Name, License use etc. To opt-out of this tracking, you can disable the "Send Anonymous Usage Statistics" toggle under preferences. Additionally, you can bypass this behavior entirely by setting the environment variable "HOUDINI_ANONYMOUS_STATISTICS = 0".

Contributors

SideFX Education and Training Team

• Bruno Ébé
• Kyle Lin
• Michael Goldfarb
• Peter Arcara

SideFX Team

• Derrick Moser

Instructors Community

• Albert Szostkiewicz
• David Torno
• Jeffy Mathew Philip