animatrix

Native SceneViewer Qt Handle in H19

Added 2021-10-31 06:21:11 +0000 UTC

Finally SESI added the ability to directly acquire the Qt handle that holds the SceneViewer. This is one of the non-advertised features but is quite useful for Qt developers. Especially since my Supercharged enhancements heavily rely on this to work properly.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/hom/hou/SceneViewer.html

The overall benefit from having this natively is you no longer have to traverse the entire Houdini GUI to obtain this handle. Not only this is error prone but it's also unstable at times.

The reason SESI added this feature is because they use it in their overlay help that shows for some tools. So they definitely didn't want to do the hack that we had to do obtain this Qt handle. Hopefully they will add this to other panes and controls so we can get any Qt handle in the Houdini GUI easily.

For example using this handle you can draw an outline around the viewport to show some state as I do with locked cameras so the user can be aware the camera is locked so any view changes will change the camera. So simple yet so effective.

I was on H19 beta so I already made the necessary changes to take advantage of this, so the whole code that deals with the overlay network editor became simpler and more robust. I will publish the new changes asap. I still have a few features I would like to add such as Nuke style multi node pinning to the parameters pane.

Also made a lot of changes to make it work smoother on Linux. I have to verify these changes in the same code to make sure it works on all platforms.

The updates will be published here but also on Gumroad.