If you are like me, so someone who doesn't want to spend the whole life filling paths in Houdini geometry nodes you will appreciate this set of scripts made by Ewan Davidson called Axis Tools

Here I will show you my favourite tools in this script collection. There are plenty of features and this article would be really long to write about all of them so explore it and use whatever is helpful for you.

Drag & Drop

The best feature of them all and I wish all applications would have that because it is so basic and time-saving.
You can drag & drop anything to Houdini and that is insane what this guy did.
- geometries like .fbx, .abc, .obj, .bgeo etc.
- textures that are imported as Arnold/Redshift/Octane nodes
- proxy files of renderers
- images to COP level
- the whole HDAs
- the whole Houdini scenes

Incremental Save and Version Jump

Great for up versioning, you can assign shortcut to it. It's available directly in "File" menu dropdown.
Tool for Version Jump allows you to open a directory of your saved scene or directly open a specific version.

Material Creation with assignment

This works the best if you assign it to a shortcut. Then it is possible to hit the shortcut and dialog window appears with various functions. This will add the "material" node to your geometry or the path in the "Render" parameter (depending on where you use it SOP or OBJ level) and create this material in a specified MAT network for you.

You can create presets as well. To be able to use presets and use them just create that preset in material settings.

File Manager

Do you have a scene in a new location or something bad is happening in the render? Reconnect, delete and repair paths with this tool. Best described with the official video.

Explore the official documentation for more.
The set of scripts for Indie costs 40£ for the whole package of scripts and one year of access to new updates. I am a customer for 2 years now so I could highly recommend this as a must-have for working in Houdini.

The cover picture is a screen from the main page of the tools.

Back in the days when I was a VFX industry baby my first job was matte painting. I loved it because everything there was about photomanipulation, how to make the result convincing enough so nobody could spot a "fake".

But there was a catch. The result was highly dependent on the images you are able to get or find. So most of the time I was searching and searching. And every time I saved a photo for later use or photographed my own or bought some packs, I forgot about them when there was the need to use those photos. So I just searched for new ones. It was so frustrating for me that I started to use more and more 3D and finally, I switched completely to 3D so I wouldn't need to search for those high-quality images anymore.

The Eagle

However, you need good resources all the time and there isn't always much time to open the internet to find them. So I decided to solve this problem. I searched applications and tried many of them even the most popular Adobe Bridge. Then I found The Eagle. It is the best app ever organizing pictures for me. It costs 30$ paid once. Considering the power and time saved with it it's nothing.

Explore the program here eagle.cool. It's a simple-looking picture manager. You can create your own folders assign icons to them, create your own structure, search them or navigate through the folders (that's what I recommend). Then it's just about drag and drop into an eagle and drag n drop out to photoshop or wherever.

Features that I love

Ability to set cover photos on folders.

Possibility to have any picture in multiple folders so your castle shot during epic sky could be in "epic skies" folder but also in "castles" folder. So don't miss it when you are browsing the sky or the castles.

Save pictures with drag n' drop from anywhere or just click on the picture with the web browser extension. The extension's biggest advantage is that you can send a picture directly to a specific folder

Reverse image search allows you to search with one click a picture you have in the library on Google. It opens up for you the website with a selected image uploaded on google.

"Show subfolder contents" allows you to see all images inside all subfolders of the selected folder.

If you saved a picture from the internet via the web browser extension the image will be saved with URL address to the original image.

Option to turn everything to greyscale just for preview.

It supports various file formats - .jgp, .png etc + .PSD or even .blend files.