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User Guide
This page provide installation and other usage information about qLib.
The assets of qLib are tested and developed in the version of Houdini that we currently use in production. At the moment this is version 12.0. Unfortunately qLib won't work with earlier versions of Houdini.
Download and unpack the latest distribution tarball from here.
Be sure to download the distribution tarball named like qLib-vX.X.X.tbz2 and not the repository snapshot by pressing the "Download as .zip" button. The repository stores the assets in textual form, which can't be used in Houdini directly. See the Developer Guide for instructions on building the actual OTL files from source.
Unpack the tarball. On Linux and Mac execute the following command in a terminal:
tar zvjf qLib-vX.X.X.tbz2
Windows users should switch to Linux. If that's not possible they can still use 7-zip to unpack the archive.
Place the unpacked folder to a convenient location - probably some place where others can access it as well - and edit your houdini.env file to add the otl directories to the HOUDINI_OTLSCAN_PATH environment variable. Creating a helper variable called QLIB can make adding the various sections a bit easier. For example the next two lines adds all but the experimental and the graveyard sections to the path:
QLIB = /Users/mate/qLab/qLib/otls
HOUDINI_OTLSCAN_PATH = @/otls:$QLIB/base:$QLIB/spec:$QLIB/future
On Windows you should use semicolon instead of colon for path separator:
QLIB = /Users/mate/qLab/qLib/otls
HOUDINI_OTLSCAN_PATH = @/otls;$QLIB/base;$QLIB/spec;$QLIB/future
Dumping the OTL files into a folder which contains other OTLs is not a recommended, because it will needlessly make updating the library more difficult.
If you need changes that are not yet released, you can create a tarball from any checked out version of the repository. You need git, python 2.7 and a shell with initialized Houdini environment to do this. On windows we use msysgit, but other shells with the proper settings may work as well.
First clone and check out the repository from github.com :
git clone https://github.com/gadfly16/qLib.git
Go to the qLib directory, and build the otl files:
cd qLib
python qdo build -R
Create the tarball:
python qdo pack
You can use the resulting tarball to install the library as described in the previous section.
Note that you can also use the repository's otls directory as the installation directory, but we don't recommend this in a production environment, since the repository is changing too fast.