Houdini General: Presets

Keywords: Houdini, Node, Preset, hidx, idx, Presets

Task: Merging Presets

This mostly happens if more than one man is working on a show using houdini, you have your node preset and you want to share it with all the other houdini-guys.
Your personal preset usually live in $HOME/houdini9.1/presets, there is a directory for every nodetype in Houdini (SOP/POP/DOP/CHOP etc). So when you create a preset a file is created with the nodename in one of the directories (eg. presets/SOP/file.idx, for the File Sop).
If in your show/shot presets is no preset file for the Node, you can easily copy the file and you should be fine, but when there is already an existing file you get into trouble, ... but here is help.
The idx files is a weird format and you should not try to edit them in a text-editor, to merge your presets you have to do the following steps.

1) expand your local presets in (eg. in $HOME/houdini9.1/Presets do "hidx -x myFilePreset file.idx")
    this creates a directory myFilePreset with all your File-SOP presets as single files
2) expand your show-presets (eg. /job/myjob/common/houdini/presets   do " hidx -x showFilePreset file.idx")
    this creates a directory showFilePreset with all the Presets for that node which are available to the show
3) copy the presets files you want to share with the show from your "myFilePreset" directory into the "showFilePreset" directory
4) pack your presets back together using "hidx -c "showFilePreset" file.idx, and the same to your presets as well.
5) and you are done