 Howdy guys, Andy Pixel here, and in this video what we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about how to stay organized when you are creating all these networks and nodes and stuff like that here inside of Houdini. Alright, staying organized, at least for me, was a very important lesson that I learned along my Houdini learning path. Once I became more organized, it just seemed like everything got a lot easier. So I wanted to share my five tips for staying organized inside of Houdini. Let's get started. Alright, so let's take a look at tip number one here, and that is basically how to layout nodes. Alright, I often find that, you know, some individuals who are just starting out with Houdini don't necessarily know about all the different types of ways you can lay these things out. So I'm gonna make a bunch of copies with these. I'm holding down alt and then left clicking and dragging. Alright, create a bunch of geo nodes. Now by default, you'll notice that they all line up with each other nicely. That's pretty good, but you'll end up over time as you're developing more nodes with, you know, just kind of a crazy structure. Now there's a bunch of ways you can go and organize all of this. So you just basically keep your sanity when you're using Houdini and you have a lot of nodes in a large network. Alright, it's very important to stay organized. So what we can do first is just select all these guys and hit shift L. And what that does is it does a layout selected. Alright, and it tries its best to make it as organized as possible. It doesn't always work, but it's a cool tool to use when you just need a really quick layout. And I highly recommend doing it on, you know, nodes that are basically all connected together. It'll go and organize it for you. So if we were to come inside of one of these geo nodes, let's say we make a null right here. And we've got a couple of these guys like so and maybe we do a merge node like this and merge these two guys. Alright, there we go. And then we just duplicate this merge node so that way we can wire in this third guy over here. Now I'm going to hold down the Y key on the keyboard to left click and drag to cut those lines. I find it's much faster to do stuff like that. Now let's say you got all this stuff all kind of messed up. Alright, and I want to organize this. So I'm going to select all those nodes and hit shift L on the keyboard and look at that. Very cool. You can also multi select these nodes and turn on their blue flags by hitting the R key to toggle between back and forth. So another quick way to do that and I believe the template flag was the W key. Yeah, there you go. Very cool. Alright, so I don't want those to put it. So that's one way to organize these things. Let's go and mess this up again. So another useful technique that I do quite often is hold down the A key on the keyboard so I can just select a bunch of nodes and hold down the A key and you notice that the cursor changes to this square type of icon. Well, if I start dragging left and right, it'll organize them in a horizontal fashion like so. Now if I were to select all these guys and hold down A and then vertically drag up and down, it organizes them into a vertical structure. Very cool. Alright, so another way to do that. You can also use the layout stuff up here. So you can say align nodes vertically. There you go. And horizontally. You notice it's not keeping the spacing. That's where the A key comes into place. Like that. Well, let's go and take a look at distribute nodes horizontally. Alright, so lots of ways you can go and do all this stuff. Okay, so that's what I wanted to cover in terms of node layout. Let's move on to tip number two. Alright, so I wanted to talk about a few extra kind of UI elements that are a good way to organize your stuff and also give your users of your HDAs or your networks a little bit more information. So let's dive back into that G02 node where we had all these guys. Now the first thing that I want to do is really simple, but I want to go up to view up here and I am going to turn on the grid and that was not in the view. There it is. If we go to our tools, my apologies, if we go to our tools and we can go and we can actually show grid lines. Alright, this allows you to snap these guys perfectly to some sort of grid. Alright, or we could display that as grid points. Another cool display. I see a lot of people actually using this one quite often. You really just want the intersections of the grid so you know where to put the individual nodes like so. Alright, or we can turn the grid off. Very cool. So that's one UI element there. The other thing I want to do is hit shift O on the keyboard and what that does, it creates what is called a net box for your nodes. This allows you to basically bundle up a bunch of nodes that are performing some, you know, main operation, if you will. At least that's how I like to use them. You can use them for whatever. The cool thing about these is you can color code these by hitting C on the keyboard to bring up the color palette. You can also hit the little button up here. Alright, and you can go and color code these guys according to some color scheme that you have. Alright, so I'm going to tap C on the keyboard again. We can also give it a title and call this, you know, step two or we can call this one step one. There we go. Very cool. And then finally, we can go and collapse these guys. And look at that. We now have a much neater network layout. Very cool. Okay, so the last thing I want to do for this particular tip is talk about the nodes. You can come up here or hit shift P on the keyboard to create a sticky note. And you can use these guys to give your users information or people who are opening your hip file a little bit more information about what's happening in this stage of your network. So you can say, cool stuff is happening here. Alright, and it will help out the the end user basically. So a really good way to kind of annotate or just give more information to the people using your your hip files. Alright, so let's move on to the next tip. Alright, so tip number three, we are going to talk about node groups. Alright, so I haven't really actually seen this talk about too much, but there's a way to basically group together your nodes here inside of Houdini and I honestly really only use it at this object level. So at this level, right, where I can see all of my main geometry. And so what we can do is we can hit shift Z on the keyboard not actually opens up the group view here. Alright, and inside of these, what we can do is we can create new groups. So we can come in here and with our nodes selected, I can come up here and I can hit node group. Alright, you'll notice that it created another group down here. So this is always here by default is all group. This is all the nodes. You can we can go and hit these little plus buttons over here to hide and show all the nodes that currently exist at the object level. But now since I added just these four selected nodes to this group one, I can go and just hide those guys. Alright, very cool. Now we can also go and toggle their display flags so we can go over here and turn all those guys off that are in the group or turn them all back on. Alright, and it also shows you the number of nodes that you have selected for this particular group plus all their names in this little drop down over here. How cool is that? Now if you wanted to go and rename this, you can just double click on the name and call it my group. And there we go. You can also come in here and add more objects to it. So let's say I wanted to add Geo3 to this guy. So I'm going to hit Geo3 or select Geo3 and then hit add to selection. And now when I turn off all those, all those guys are gone. Alright, so we can also remove it. I'm going to say remove selection from group. And now we've removed it. Very cool. So you just keep going, add more groups. You know, usually I use this for like, you know, landscape stuff. And then I'll have, you know, another group in here. So I hit G on the keyboard just to create another group and I call this, you know, buildings. And those would be all the building nodes. And this would be all the landscape and foliage nodes. Alright, so that's groups inside of Houdini 17.5. Alright, so let's talk about tip number four. So I'm going to go and hide the group palette there by hitting shift Z on the keyboard. And let's dive into our Geo2 over here where we have our net boxes. Now, let's say I have this really complicated network. Let me actually just copy all these guys and see if I can make a relatively complicated network here. We'll plug that guy into there, just making some fictitious procedural network here. And maybe this comes out to here. And we do it again. There we go. Come over here. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Alright, so let's say that I'm generating some geometry up here. Alright, so let's actually just pump a sphere into this for some odd reason. There we go. Alright, so let's say I'm creating a sphere up here and I need access to this particular sphere all the way down here at the bottom of my network. Well, I could come in here, you know, and just put in a merge node like so, and then just drag a long line all the way down there. While that is totally valid, you'll totally get the right result. You'll merge the sphere with whatever is coming down through the stream. Alright, but that definitely starts to create really nasty looking networks and it could actually prevent you from being productive. You know, when you have a lot of strings crisscrossing your network and you're going and creating, you know, new nodes, so let's make another null node here. And you're trying to wire it up. They'll get sometimes automatically connected to the wrong input. When you're working on, you know, effects type things where you have these heavy caches and stuff that could really screw up your time. So a quick couple of ways to do this. One way to do it is you can go and you can alt click the line to create these kind of routing nodes there. That allows you to go and do that and you can create, you know, as many of these as you really want. So you can go and do that. That's still not, you know, ideal. I'm just going to drag select those guys and hit delete on the keyboard to get rid of them. The thing that I like to do is I like to use an object merge node. This allows you to find geometry from other sides of your network. So I'm going to say get sphere here. And I'm going to turn off transform because I don't need to import any transform information from this guy. But what I want to do is I want to basically put this information, the sphere information or geometry into this object merge node. What we can do, there's a couple of ways you can do it. You can select this node and we can do dot dot forward slash to go and find that sphere node. All right, so that's one way to do it. So now that sphere geometry is inside of this object merge node. You can also come up here and with that selected, you can pan up here and drag and drop the node into that object slot there. So now I can just get rid of this line here and pump that into the merge node. And that's a really good way to say organize. We just cleaned up our network. So I don't have all these crazy criss-crossing lines everywhere. All right, so another helpful tip when working with nodes inside of Houdini. And finally, we get to tip number five and that is going to be subnets. All right, subnets are really cool. They're kind of like HDAs, but they're not HDAs. All right, but they allow you to basically take a bunch of nodes and put them into what is called a subnet, which is the beginning of an HDA. You always package it up into a subnet and then convert it into an HDA. So in this case, what we can do is we can just create a subnet for this because I don't want to have to select all these nodes, hit Ctrl C and Ctrl V all the time to copy that same operation. What I want to do is I want to come up here and select all these guys and put it in a subnet. So you can hit this button or you can hit Shift C on the keyboard and that puts out this subnet. All right, so this is, you know, my function, if you will. All right, so then I'm going to dive in to this guy and now I have access to all those nodes. All right, and it's a lot easier to, you know, copy and paste this from an organizational standpoint than it is to copy that whole network over and over again. You'll just, your networks will just explode with nodes. And so inside of here, we have access to all the inputs. All right, so these represent all the input geometry, whatever you're sending in to each one of these inputs. And we also have by default a single input, but let's say I want to actually output more than one thing. All right, so let's say I want to output the sphere and the result of this merge. We can actually drop down an output node here and call that output zero. I'm going to come over here and output another one. But you'll notice that if we have two of these output nodes in here, they conflict with each other because they need an actual unique index for each one of these. So this is zero and this one's going to be, you have to be one. There we go. So now if I were to jump up and out, I have two outputs. All right. How cool is that? We can name these things too. We can call this, you know, merged and we can call this a ridge sphere or something like that. And with that, we've just created our first subnetwork that has two outputs. And you can go and add as many outputs as you need. At least I think you can. I've never reached a limit really. So I might be wrong on that, but I have two. Most of the time you'll be around two or three, you know, for these things. But it's a great way to bundle up functionality. So hopefully all that was helpful. Thank you guys so much for the support. If you like this video, subscribe or share it or, you know, show your friends, whatever. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much guys. Talk to you in a bit.