 Howdy guys IndiePixel here and what I wanted to do was cover a request that I got from one of the YouTube subscribers And that is how do we actually use a file node inside of Houdini? And it kind of got me thinking it'd be kind of cool to actually show everyone, you know Just how many ways there are to actually export stuff from Houdini. There's multiple ways as there is Inside of Houdini there's so many ways to skin a cat So what I wanted to do first was at least cover the file node So the first thing that you can do is you can hit tab on the keyboard and just drop down a file node Now this is actually a geometry node But what they've done is they've made it so automatically populates it with the file node So what you can do is you can go and drop down some geometry or whatever geometry I have coming out of whatever network you've made In this case, I'm just gonna set up a sphere here. All right, and you can come in here and we can go and set this to Write files, but what I want to do is just set it to no operation right now because I don't want to overwrite the default BGO Okay, so what I want to do is I want to set it to no operation first like so and Then what we're gonna do is I'm going to Set this to where I'm gonna export it here. So we're just gonna call this sphere 01 and You can actually give it any sort of extension you want. So if I did something like OBJ Like that. All right, what it's going to do is it's going to export it to OBJ for me So now all I need to do is hit write files and that automatically does it so anytime I change You know a parameter in here. It's automatically writing it because I have this set to write files All right, and so we can actually prove that because we can now use a file node to actually import that same sphere All right, so let's just go and get that And there you go. We have the same exact sphere All right, and so if I were to actually move this guy down like so All right, and come back over here and reload that geometry And then come back over here and reload. There we go. Look at that Cool. All right, so that's one way that we can save out geometry and we can do it You know real time just by having this file node turned on All right, so there's actually quite a few other ways to get geometry out. So let's create a box over here All right, and I'm just going to leave it at its defaults because we don't really need to change it And let's put down something like a geometry output Look at that. So there's this node called it rock geometry output All right, and what we can do with this is export again to a Mesh of any type really as long as you you can type in whatever file extension you want there all right and What I can do is I can I can provide it a SOP path or you can just feed this in directly you can see now It's filled in with that obj file box of one But let's do the the SOP way because you know, that's pretty much just like what we did the file node Let's look at you know a little bit more advanced way of doing this So it's looking for a SOP path. This box node is a SOP. Okay, so all we need to do is go and get it Like so And we can actually remove all this stuff All right, so if you want a relative link, you can just put in dot dot forward slash and we get the box All right. All right. So what I'm gonna do here is I am going to now export it All right to a folder. So let's just do this. This is pretty cool. Let's call this um my box and Then forward slash and we'll do box o1.obj Alright now if you have Houdini Indie or core or effects you can export to fbx But if you're using apprentice then we need to do obj or you can also do bgio, which is a houdini format Or you can do gio, which is also houdini format. So what I'm gonna do is obj and With that done I can literally just hit the save to disk button and let's get our file node again So we can import it All right, and let's go up one and you can see I've made this folder called my box and there's my box Ta-da Cool All right, so that's the rock geometry. All right. So again, if you have Houdini Indie or core or effects you can always do the rock fbx output Basically is the same thing as this rock geometry I could literally actually use the rock geometry node as well and just do fbx and that would still work This one just gives you control over the FX exports. All right, so you can go in here and you can actually set it to, you know, the different DCC packages you can pick a different SDK All right, you can turn on and off all these different features All right, so that's the fbx and so the last thing I really wanted to cover in this video I wanted to keep it short because really these are the ones that I use the most because I'm dealing a lot in Geometry, but when you want to work in with the images Inside of Houdini, that's when we start working with composites So if I were to drop down a composite node over here, I think I Yeah, there we go So composite cop to network. All right, so I'm at the object level so I'm gonna drop down a cop to network and Inside of here what I want to do is create a noise node just so I have something to export All right, I'm gonna turn off this noise per component and come in here and just set this to some like five 12 512 All right, and what we want to do is we want to export this as a texture, right? Because currently if I were to show this so I need to go in here and actually pick it out of the I Need to display it in the composite view over here. There's my texture Cool. What I want to do is throw down a rock An output image a rock file, but that's what it is All right, and you can feed in the the result there again You could always just point it to a particular cop right here So if I were to unplug this you can see that we can just go and get the result from noise Like so or you can just wire it into like so All right, so then what I can do is I can render this out now The plane scope is actually very important because what this is saying is we're gonna export the color We're gonna export the alpha, but you can also just remove one of these and just export color or keep it there And you have both so now we have Color and alpha. All right So with that last thing all we really need to do is I'm just gonna render the current frame I don't need to render a bunch of images here and I want to send it into a render folder and we're gonna call this noise Dot jpeg Like so and what it's gonna do is it's gonna try to figure out the Formats color space and all of its settings and stuff. Houdini is pretty awesome that way. It actually tries to Figure it all out for you All right, so with that all I need to do is hit render What's gonna happen is a little composite view thing. He's gonna come up here And it's gonna tell me that it's rendering and actually it went so fast Didn't even pop up. So what I can do now is drop down a file Node in here. All right, and we can actually go and get our Noise, so let's go to our hip and let's go to render. There's our noise jpeg Look at that same exact thing so That is a couple ways to get data out of Houdini. All right, so I'm gonna leave you guys there Thanks much