Ω Hpaste is a small tool that allows you to easily exchange snippets of nodes with coworkers, and save your own node setups to collections. you may read about it here and here
A couple of new features were added to HPaste.
Asset definitions are now saved to the snippet
So now when you send some nodes to a friend/coworker you don't have to worry about your special assets that the receiver might not have. Definitions of non standard assets are saved into snippet and are embedded into receiver's hip file if he/she doesn't have such definition already.
So, on sending end in asset manager you might see something like this:
and or receiving end, if the receiver did not have that asset definition, the manager will look like this after pasting the snippet:
and, of course, there's your snippet in the network editor, fully operational:
The asset definitions that are installed from the snippet will be installed into the hip file, so it will increase the hip size and will be available only in current hip file, if left how it is. However, you can always simply open asset manager and move received asset definition from being embedded into hip file to any other place you want, like your user library, studio library.
Some options are now available
there's a new button on the shelf called Hpaste Options
When you press it a little window will pop up
Plugin Checker
The upper part at last allows you to set your own proirity of what web services to use for HPasteWeb.
You can set your own priority and HPaste will try out all plugins from highest priority to the lowest.
A big word of warning: as you may see even from the screenshot, some plugins appear to be Broken, but they actually work, you can reach their sites. The problem here is different SSL versions in different pythons. For example the screenshot above was made in standard python 2.7.5 that comes with Houdini on Windows.
Yet for example on linux with default python starting from 2.7.10 plugins TextSave and HasteBin will be available due to updated SSL versions in urllib2 library. (Sprunge and DumpText seem to be really broken though)
So always check with the person you exchange if he has some specific service available.
Some services like WePaste, IX, PasteNet do not require tsl, so they are available for everyone, but they may be super slow (like PasteNet)
If a plugin test fails on your system it will show Broken, if test passes - it will state Valid together with a ping time for the service. Note: Time stated is just response time, it doesn't reflect upload or download speed! For example, Gihub has bretty high response time due to its web API calls, but its actuall upload/download speed is pretty high.
Hpaste Options
Some options are now available for hpaste as well. For now it's just for the new HDA transfer feature
- Save definitions for non-standard assets to snippet - enables the new feature of hda transfer, enabled by default, but you can disable it if for example you are working in studio environment and do not want to send studio asset together with your snippet to outer internet
- Ignore assets in snippets if definition is already installed in session - when loading the snippet - hpaste checks if incoming asset definition is already loaded in receiving houdini and ingnores incoming definitions if this checkbox is enabled. It is On by default to evade scenarios when people from same workgroup exchange snippets hdas, and get incoming hdas loaded into their hip files though they have perfectly same asset definition already loaded.
- Force definitions in the snippet to be preferred - if this checkbox is on - asset definitions loaded from snippets will be marked as preferred for houdini to use. This will ensure receiving houdini will load exactly the same asset definition the sending party was using, but it can lead to undesirable effects if used carelessly, therefore it's disabled by default.
HPaste is and always will be free to use and open source here: https://github.com/pedohorse/hpaste