About Houdini Cookbook

This site is a collection of useful HoudiniFX setups. Any setup can be copied and pasted to Houdini using our shelf tool.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out at codercatclub@gmail.com.

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Motivation and Goals

We created this Houdini Cookbook because:

• We needed a way to quickly share and store small Houdini node setups. Previously, we attempted to create HDA libraries, but it was too cumbersome for our small team.
• We believe there is a better way to share Houdini examples than by sharing entire Houdini files.
• We enjoy sharing our small setups with the Houdini community.
• We strongly believe in the idea of "Own Your Data," therefore we do not hold any published recipes hostage. All recipes are backed up once a day to a public Git repository here. Even if this service goes down, anyone can still download the full collection and use it directly with the Cookbook shelf tool or by using the two Python functions described below.
• We also embrace the idea of decentralization, and we are considering open sourcing the Cookbook web service so that anyone can run it locally with their own collection or as their own public webpage. Let us know if this is something that interests you.

How Does It Work

In Houdini 20.5, SideFX introduced a new Recipe system that allows users to save collections of nodes into human-readable structured text files (JSON). Within this, they added a new collection of Python utilities (hou.data) that allows for creating and loading recipes programmatically.

In particular, the Cookbook shelf tools use hou.data.selectedItemsAsData(...) for copying nodes and hou.createItemsFromData(...) for pasting.

For this web service, we use the Go programming language and store all submitted recipes in plain text JSON files.