 Howdy guys. All right. So in this video, what I want to do is cover something that a lot of people ask me When it comes to developing your own HDA libraries, you know, if you have any experience building HDAs for Houdini That's you know, you can place them into your standard OTL's folder, right? So inside of documents and usually when you are first starting out the HDAs a lot of your HDAs will go there Right, but you might want to actually have your own folder With you know certain types of HDAs in one folder and another type of HDAs in another folder Right, and you want them to all be loaded up when you launch Houdini All right, and that's where the Houdini environment variables come into play and what I wanted to show in this video all right, and so I already have you know a tab menu here with a bunch of HDAs already loaded up and what I want to do is show you how to get all that stuff to load up when You create your own libraries of HDAs, so Let's walk through this process So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to my documents folder And I'm actually just going to put a folder here at my documents basically and let's go and make actually I'm just going to use this little button up here, and we'll just call this indie pixel HDAs like so all right and inside of there. We don't have any HDAs So let's go and make one really quick. It's a really simple one. I'll call this a box maker Because I don't want to spend a bunch of time showing how to build complex HDAs in this video All right, so now I have a box node inside of there I'm going to go and right-click my geometry node and go to create digital assets And I'm going to set this up with my name spaces So I'm going to do IP for indie pixel two colons, and then at the end of it do 1.0 For the version number all right, and then for the label I go and do this now It's not totally necessary. It's just a style choice now. You'll notice down here at the bottom He usually will default to your documents folder otl's folder. All right And that's totally fine But like I said before you might want to have your own libraries of HDAs that you pass around And so your folder is probably not going to be in documents all the time, and so let's save this particular HDA into that folder, so I'm going to go to my home folder here, and I'm going to look for the indie pixel HDA Folder in here I can find it Good documents There it is. All right, and I want to save it in that location hit accept and then accept destroy all spare parameters And I'm going to put 1.0 for the version here, and then interactive I'm going to go and set the context so we put it into indie pixel and and for slash utils and I'm going to make sure it's an object Contents context only because it's only at the object level here. All right Cool. So with that all set up. Let's add a couple parameters. Just to make it official I'm going to hide all my default parameters. Let's dive inside and I'm just going to do alt middle mouse click to Expose the uniform scale hit apply and accept and there we go So now if I go to indie pixel here up at the OBJ level You can see I have my I have an old crate sphere, but I also have the IP box maker All right, and so this allows me to go and instantiate that right if I were to shut down Houdini now Let's discarding quit. Let's do Houdini and I want core 416 The HDA won't actually be loaded up right because the environment variables haven't been set up to look at that specific folder all right, so I'm going to go and shut down the help there and You'll notice now if I go to my utils. I only get the crate sphere, which is an old legacy HDA I need to delete. All right. And so how do we go about making sure that we constantly tell Houdini to look into this Indie pixel HDAs folder. All right, so that is all done inside of our Houdini environment variable So if we go into our documents Into the version of Houdini that you're using you'll find this Houdini.env file All right, so if I were to go and open this let's open it with that code All right, there we go and let me hide that particular guy there All right And what we want to do is we want to set all this stuff up. So we needed to access a particular Houdini environment variable and that's going to be called the Houdini Like so all caps Right, and then we want the otl scan path All right, we want to set that equal to something now You can find out more information about all of these paths if you go up to the help documentation And you go to the customization in the Houdini help and go to environment variables You can go see a list of all the other Environment variables that you can set and so we are looking for the Houdini otl scan path that allows us to basically add on Directories that have HDAs that we want to include on launch of Houdini. All right, so Yeah, bunch of them in there. All right So let's go back here and what I want to do is I want to set this to that path to the folder up here So let's go up one and I'm just gonna get the path. So I want to go and get any pixel HDAs there we go. All right, so I'm just gonna dive inside Get the path. So just hit the little folder icon there. You can type it into I just save myself time And I just need to make sure we put forward slashes on these guys Like so All right, very cool. So now we've just set the otl scan path to This particular folder. All right, so let's save this and see if that works. Let's close down Houdini And let's launch it again. So I'm gonna do core Let it launch And you'll notice down in the console What's happening is we can't find any of the other nodes now what I've done is I completely overwritten The otl scan path so I've told Houdini that only the HDAs that it can load are inside of this folder Which is only one so, you know nodes like mountain 2.0 or fall off or you know ripple point wrangle They can't find any of those literally like I cannot find any of the other HDAs and that's not good So what we need to do In our scan path over here is we need to put a semicolon and then the and symbol like so All right, let's save that And then let's shut down Houdini and launch it again This will make sure basically that it'll just append this particular path onto all the other default otl folders All right, so let's go and launch Houdini again And see if that works. We shouldn't get any errors now or warnings in the console when it launches Yeah, so we got all of our nodes back, which is awesome And now if I hit tab go to any pixel you can see we have our box maker hda How cool is that? So now I've just included that particular folder and you can do this with any folder now Well, that lives on your system. Maybe it's up on a network drive or a shared drive All right Cool way to just pass around your hdas. All right, and that's what I wanted to show in this video. Thanks so much