SmileHotBox Framework Offers a HotBox Style Customizable Menu of Tools for Houdini, Nuke, and Maya.

Chen Lujun (Smile) is a research development lead who has written an open source framework for accessing commonly used tools, enabling users to speed up their workflows in Side Effects Houdini. SmileHotBox is a python script that lets you quickly load and access tools in a “hot box” style pie menu.

Chen says that the tools have been in use for more than a year, and is just now sharing the source code as open source. Technical Directors should be able to expand on the tools quickly and work them into their pipelines. SmileHotBox should work on any DCC that supports PySide2, so that would include applications such as Nuke and Maya too.

Learn more about the open source hot-box framework here.