User Guide > Overview > Digital Assets   

Working with Digital Assets

A Digital Asset lets a CG artist or technical director create custom tools that provide a high-level interface for a more complex network. An asset can contain different network types that all exist in relation to each other. This makes it easy to package up the parts of an asset and publish it as a tool.

In this lesson you will install an Operator Type Library and use its Primitives tool to build up a simple scene.


1. Installing an OTL

Click the following to install an OTL (Operator Type Library) into your current scene. This will make a tool called Primitives available for you to work with. Normally you would install an OTL by selecting File > Install Operator Type Library.

Load Start File


2. Use the Primitives Tool

In the Viewer pane, press tab > primitives then RMB-click to accept. This places a Sphere in your scene. From the Operations Control Bar, change the Shape to Plane.Now click-drag on the object's Length and Width HUD sliders to resize the plane.

A Digital Asset can have controls such as the Shape menu and the HUD sliders set up to simplify control at the Object level.


3. Create another Primitive

Press q to repeat the last operation. Another Primitive object is created. Go to the object's Control tab. This contains two new tabs named Shape and Shading. Change the Shape to Cone and the Color to Red.


4. Go into the Operator

In the Network pane, select the Primitives operation and press i to go into it. Here you find that you are in a subnetwork which contains a shapes object and a shopnet. Select the shapes object and go into it. Now you see the network that defines the switching of the primitives.

In the Parameter pane, the various parameters are grayed out. These parameters are part of the operators network that were published up to the object level by the asset's author. They are locked by default making it easier to prevent artists from tinkering with the setup. In the next lesson, you will learn how to access these parameters when you need to update a custom operation.

Press the u key until you go back up to the top of the network. You can now build a scene with a few Primitive objects each with their own shape and color.


5. Get Help

In the Parameter pane, you click on the question mark [?] to call up the help for this operator. In this case a fictitious Houdini Animation Company has created a custom help panel with all parameters documented and even a custom color. Information about the version number and date of the particular tool are also posted to help communicate with team members.

This help is created using html and, in this case, is a derivative of the code used to build Houdini's own operator help pages. Later when you create your own custom operation you will learn how to create help.