Houdini Indie's procedural node-based workflow offers a smarter way to create high quality game art. Houdini technology is used by AAA studios to take their games to the next level and now this procedural power is also available to indie game devs around the world.
There have been some problems with installing SideFX Labs tools in Houdini 19.5 on Steam.
Follow these workaround steps to install the tools.
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Here is a short guide to manually downloading the latest version of SideFXLabs and installing it into your local packages directory.
First, download the latest version of SideFXLabs from the git repo using this link:
https://github.com/sideeffects/SideFXLabs/archive/refs/heads/Development.zip
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TL;DR
1. Extract the zip file into your ~/Documents/houdini19.5/packages folder (create if doesn't exist).
(MacOS) Extract the zip file into your ~/Library/Preferences/houdini/19.5/packages folder (create if doesn't exist).
2. Rename the extracted folder from 'SideFXLabs-Development' to 'SideFXLabs19.5'
3. Move the SideFXLabs19.5/SideFXLabs.json file up to the packages directory
4. Restart Houdini
5. Enjoy!
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NOTE: MacOS users will find their Houdini User Preferences folder located at ~/Library/Preferences/houdini/19.5
Step by step instructions for Windows users:
On Windows, your Houdini User Preferences folder is located at ~/Documents/houdini19.5/ and you can get there quickly with file explorer by entering %USERPROFILE% and pressing enter which will take you there automatically.
Once there you can browse into the 'Documents folder', then find the 'houdini19.5' directoy under that.
This folder holds your local user configuration data for Houdini.
It's going to look something like this 'C:\Users\\Documents\houdini19.5' for Windows users.
Within that 'houdini19.5' directory, create a sub-directory named 'packages' and then extract the downloaded SideFXLabs-Development.zip file into the 'packages' directory.
Under 'packages' you should now have 'SideFXLabs-Development' directory
(IMPORTANT) : rename 'SideFXLabs-Development' to 'SideFXLabs19.5'
Inside the 'SideFXLabs19.5' directory, you will find a 'SideFXLabs.json' file
(IMPORTANT) : move the SideFXLabs.json file into the parent 'packages' folder
Restart Houdini and you should now have access to the latest Labs tools.
