Frequently Asked Questions

• Can OD Tools for Houdini make coffee ?

NO ! But with all the time its going to save you, YOU can !

• What's the best way to contact you ?

In the Main Menu, you will find the link to our Discord server. Other than that, feel free to email us, but the preferred way is discord.

![Untitled](<https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/f048e2a8-344a-4ab7-ad0d-4fdf98f364e1/Untitled.png>)

• How often do you update ?

Quite regularly. I believe in agile development and try to get things out to users as quickly as possible.

• I would love to change the defaults of some of the HDA nodes like substance painter ?

Simply go to the cogwheel in the parameter window of the node and choose "Save Defaults".

• Substance Painter Bridge is not bringing any of my images in ?

Make sure that the naming of the files to be brought in is correct. You can find the token that the HDA is looking for in the settings tab of the node. Furthermore, please make sure that you are exporting from painter using the PBR Metal Roughness template.

• Something is not behaving as expected ? What am I doing wrong ?

Check the console output. Do you see any error messages ?.. if so, please report.

• How can I bring in models with textures ?

There's a variety of ways, depending on your need.

1. FBX Files (as long as textures are assigned correctly within the fbx, meaning, it loads them in by default)

1a. filenode, its very fast, flattened fbx.. it will has a material assignment (shop materialpath), but no materials. You can quickly create the materials (not the textures or anything ,but simply the referenced material containers with shop_materialpath to matnet..

1b. Import as scene... that will create a matnet, which, if the fbx was written half way decent, should also have textures.... if it does, you simply go to the matnet it creates.. select the materials.. right click and convert materials

1c. Fbx labs importer, that instead of a scene, will import into a subnet, where also a matnet is created, and you again, can go there, select all, and right click convert materials

1d. Kinefx character import fbx... actually is pretty decent, and works also AT TIMES, with things other than characters.. there's a specific kinefx character import to matnet right click option for that..

<aside>
💡 All of those choices, are choices you can make when you drag an fbx in.. it should ask you for those... there's others, like agents, etc.. but they are probably less applicable

</aside>

2. USDZ files

2a. You will have to work in Solaris to be able to bring in the file with textures

3. GLTF/B files

3a. You bring in the asset via the GLTF importer... after that you can treat the materials with convert materials to get it to work with your renderer

<aside>
💡 Once you have an item brought in with all the textures, you could save it as an HDA or as odzip asset to the asset library.

</aside>

• I have some python error when trying to invoke a python panel. What do I do ?

Most of the time, setting the an environment variable HOUDINI_CONSOLE_PYTHON_PANEL_ERROR=1 will give you (and me) a better idea of what’s going on.

• Lately, I am getting a lot of errors when I hit any key in the network editor, this never happened before ?

This is because you would have an outdated networkEditorKeys.json file in your ODTools folder. If you never customized the hotkeys, simply delete it, if you did customize the hotkeys, update it to have all the entries of the networkEditorKeys-Sample.json file

• The Menu of ODTools shows up all the way at the beginning, and I get MainMenuCommon.xml errors when Houdini Starts

This is most likely caused by a package conflict or some package/env not being configured correctly. If you are using package files (which you should), make sure that at the end of path assignments, you don't use the “;&’

• FFmpeg related tools. Make sure you add the location where ffmpeg.exe can be found to your system path environment variables. So if you have ffmpeg in c:\temp\ffmpeg.exe, your PATH system variable should have c:\temp added to it.