Python

"Flipbook" for Houdini

If you're like me, at some point you've wanted to record the parameter window (or any other window in Houdini) across an animation. First thought that comes to mind is likely a video capture program to record everything on the screen. But that doesn't always work as required - sometimes if the recorder will record the screen, but it'll make keyframes for it's video and drop the frames it doesn't think are important. Sometimes that works, other times it'll drop a frame where something changed. Either way, you won't end up with the same number of frames for the parameter video as you will for the scene video, and that makes it hard to sync the two together.

So I developed this script to perform that function. This script will take a screenshot, advance to the next frame, and repeat until it's taken a screenshot for every frame. This will help with syncing the video of the scene and the parameters (and any other window that you want to record). It'll also work around the sometimes annoying feature where the values in the parameter window will not update with every frame.

The one downside is you will have to hand-edit the code to set the frame range for the screenshots you want. That's because the Python functions inside of Houdini to access the timebar are not yet implemented, which is a shame.

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