Currently, the AYON Houdini addon lacks a dedicated HDA to be used for submitting and publishing custom outputs, such as Flipbooks, Alembic caches, geometry exports, simulations, and other arbitrary output types directly from within the Houdini network, for instance, from the OUT or TOP context.
Presently, it is only possible to publish these outputs via the AYON Publisher, which requires opening a separate publishing dialog and manually triggering the publish process.
While this works well for standardized outputs-such as renders, models, or caches-defined through templates, it can be very limiting when the artists or TDs want to:
Send custom tasks or outputs directly from within the Houdini scene.
Integrate procedural or automated publishing pipelines inside existing Houdini setups.
Publish Flipbooks, custom geometry exports, or intermediate caches all without leaving the node network. Create custom node-based submission systems that allow publishing to AYON directly from a node, similar to Deadline submission nodes.
Hello,
So this is currently under development/experimental.
And, this post is a great opportunity to discuss this feature and expected user experience.
As a food for thought here are some of the experimented solutions and the core concept/idea behind them:
This idea was about exploring adding publish options to the rop node as parameters so that users don’t need to open the publisher window.
It also included experimenting having a list of files similar to fabia’s idea.
This thing is very powerful as it enables hijacking the render process and register intermediate processes such as AYON Publish process. while this is not available in Houdini as it doesn’t support OpenAssetIO yet.
However it’s important to keep it in mind.
Here’s a demo from Katana (which is the only DCC that supports it).
