SideFX Houdini AI Skill Guide (Claude)

Overview & Engine Architecture

SideFX Houdini is a procedural VFX / USD pipeline DCC. Agents should treat .hip files as graphs of cooks, caches as versioned artifacts ($HIP/cache/...), PDG/TOPs as dependency contracts (not “hope files appear”), and Karma as a Hydra delegate with MaterialX GPU constraints. Automation runs through hython / hbatch, VEX in wranglers, and Solaris LOPs for USD lighting/render.