Houdini Flipbook To MP4

Intro:

Hello, this tool makes your workflow faster! How painful it is to export a video from your Houdini viewport. The traditional way is to create the flipbook with MPlay and wait for it to be ready for lunch, then export the video as AVI and convert it to MP4 or MOV (prores) using Handbrake or Media Encoder.

I came up with a better way to generate flipbooks, it's fast and very handy, and you'll get to use it so quickly.

Installation guide:

Download the ZIP file and move it to your Houdini Preference Folder "C:\Users\{USER}\Documents\houdiniXX.X" and extract it there, after that remove the zip file.

*Please take a backup from your preferences folder before installing

How to use:

After installing, restart Houdini if it's opened, you will find a new menu called Tools>Run Flipbook>Run added at the main Houdini menubar or just press CTRL+SHIFT+F to start the flipbook,

• You can edit the options by pressing CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+F to modify the start frame and end frame, you can type expressions such as $FSTART and $FEND or type numbers like 1001, if you change these default settings, it will be saved into the $HIP/flipbook/settings.json file so when you restart Houdini you can find the modifications present.
• Comment options can allow you to type your comments on top of the video output by writing HScript expressions, just type them in , and you can change the font file and size as well if needed. You can type [shotcam] to print the camera that you see from.
• A slider to change font text size.
• The auto backup option, allows you to save a backup hip file that generated the flipbook video with the same name in $HIP/flipbook/bk/
• Feature to choose .mov format output for reacher colors and sharper quality.
• Selecting custom font if needed.

How it works:

It saves a sequence of JPG images in your temp folder from your viewport baked into any LUTs or color corrections, then it runs FFMPEG.exe -embedded in the installation folder- command to convert it to MP4 format directly to your HIP Folder 📂 then opens that file with your default video player at your windows and prints to console the output path.

It works by default at SOPs and it can run at the stage context with Houdini GL, Karma, and Karma XPU.

Release Notes:

It works with Windows only and Houdini version should be higher than 19.0 (Python 3+).