User Guide > Overview   

Digital Assets

In a typical production environment, scenes are built up of varous assets such as sets, props, characters, lights and cameras. The management of these elements can be a daunting task as these assets mix and match between different shots. Many artists will be working with the assets and they must be maintained throughout the production process.

Houdini lets technical directors build assets as custom tools, each with their user interface, then store these in Operator Type Libraries (OTLs) that can be put into the production pipeline for use by artists and animators.

Creating these assets is possible in Houdini at all levels. You can have a custom SOP, SHOP, POP, or COP. You can even set up custom VOPs. In the following lessons the focus is on Digital Assets at the Object level, although the concepts are similar for custom tools throughout Houdini. Object-level Assets can also contain other network types using the network-within-network capabilities.


To learn about Digital Assets, you can work through the following lessons:

Working with Digital Assets - In this lesson, you will install an OTL then work with its custom tools to explore what the artist sees when working with a Houdini digital asset.

Creating an Object-level Asset - In this lesson, you will create the same tool you were working with in the previous lesson. You will learn how to package up the related Operators then create an Operator Type and build the custom user interface.

Promoting Parameters - In the last lesson, you explored different ways of building a custom digital asset interface by promoting parameters. This lesson offers a quick list of all the methods available for promoting parameters.

Promoting Handles - This lesson offers a list of the methods available for quickly promoting handles to a digital asset.

Interacting with Digital Assets - Using a digital asset character as an example, you will explore how to interact with the digital asset and its nested controls.