I came across this great initiative the other day from ThinkingMedia’s Mathew Foscarini with a site called xTools. The goal of xTools is to be an Open Source community driven project to develop useful assets for SideFX Houdini, and make those assets available to everyone for free. Check out the xTools site for more information.
…xTools is an open source community driven project to develop useful assets for SideFX Houdini, and make those assets available to everyone for free…
Mathew came up with the idea for xTools over the course of creating projects over at ThinkingMedia, there became a growing pool of digital assets and Mathew placed them in a library that was used internally and were displayed in a Houdini tab labeled “x”.
Mat notes that “it started to become difficult to locate the assets in the Tab menu so we started prefixing asset labels with the letter “x”. The letter “x” wasn’t used by any other asset names in Houdini so pressing Tab then “x” would always show our tools. The assets were often referred to as tools and with that “xTools” was born.”
The assets of xTools are a collection of micro tools designed to be used as features in Houdini. Most of the assets are designed especially for networks in Houdini (the SOP network for example). There are also some assets related to special tasks or complex operations. These special assets have been grouped together into packages (the xStudio collection of assets for example).
