Node Graph Tools

The nodegraph module provides an object to manipulate Houdini nodegraph titles.

NodeGraphTitleManager

The NodeGraphTitleManager class is a singleton object that provides the ability to manage titles on your scene’s node graph. It can be used to set the left or right title values to static or dynamic values, as well as whether to include the default Houdini provided information in the output.

Currently Houdini supports setting the titles in the top left and right areas. You should use the NodeGraphTitleLocation enum to indicate which to set.

Static Titles

The most common titles you would set are static ones that don’t need to dynamically update. A common use for this would be to set the title to indicate a current pipeline context such as Show / Seq / Shot or a role.

To set static titles you just need to pass in the values you want to be displayed with the NodeGraphTitleManager.set_static_title() method.

>>> NodeGraphTitleManager().set_static_title(
...     NodeGraphTitleLocation.LEFT, "This is the left title"
... )
>>> NodeGraphTitleManager().set_static_title(
...     NodeGraphTitleLocation.RIGHT, "This is the right title"
... )

Here we see that we’ve added out values into the titles and that we also maintain the default title information provided by Houdini. In this case the Performance Monitor is enabled and providing additional information on the left, and the current node context is displayed on the right.

We can choose not to include the default data if desired:

>>> NodeGraphTitleManager().set_static_title(
...     NodeGraphTitleLocation.LEFT, "This is the left title", include_default=False
... )
>>> NodeGraphTitleManager().set_static_title(
...     NodeGraphTitleLocation.RIGHT, "This is the right title", include_default=False
... )

Dynamic Titles

It is also possible to set the titles to be dynamic and updated any time the network editor is redrawn. To do this you need to pass a callable object which returns a string using the NodeGraphTitleManager.set_dynamic_title() method

>>> import datetime
>>> def title_graph_with_date():
...     return str(datetime.datetime.now())
...
>>> NodeGraphTitleManager().set_dynamic_title(
...     NodeGraphTitleLocation.LEFT, title_graph_with_date
... )

Now, any time the network editor is updated the title will update to the time it occurs.

Resetting Titles

You can easily reset the titles to the default behavior via the NodeGraphTitleManager.reset_title().

>>> NodeGraphTitleManager().reset_title(NodeGraphTitleLocation.LEFT)
>>> NodeGraphTitleManager().reset_title(NodeGraphTitleLocation.RIGHT)