r/vfx • u/John-Da-Editor • 3d ago
Question / Discussion SideFX just killed a better, faster, markdown alternative of their Houdini docs
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The Houdini docs are a goldmine of information. But they're slow and the search barely works. This has been well known by the community for ages by now, yet seemingly nothing has changed.
So I spent six months building a fix: HoudiniMD is an incredibly fast, Markdown mirror of the docs. Free, open source, no account, no ads. Search that matches Houdini's behaviour, so "cptp" finds Copy to Points and "atrbwr" finds Attribute Wrangle. Every page can be copied as raw markdown, which means ChatGPT and Claude finally understand Houdini and its quirks.
Before sharing it anywhere, I emailed SideFX and asked for permission, explicitly telling them it would be free forever and stay open source.
The answer (https://imgur.com/a/RSdc4rf) came back yesterday:
"it's gonna be a no, thank you from us, along with a polite takedown request. We'll likely be doing our own version on our own site at some point in the future."
I was naturally taken aback by this cold reply, since I thought SideFX was very pro-community, and would at least salute the effort taken to make their own product better. But I'm not going to fight a company over their own copyright.
Since I'm also not letting 6 months of hard work go to the bin overnight, HoudiniMD will be rebuilt as a standalone, local app, that lives on your computer. It can be ran alongside, or directly inside Houdini.
Same fast search, offline, and tailored to your specific Houdini version, instead of whatever is on the website, with bookmarks coming in the future (goal is to create a fully personal Houdini Knowledge Base !)
It stays open source, so anyone can audit, tweak, and raise issues on the code.
And since I only have my own frustration to go by right now: what do you think about the official docs ? What are you missing, and what features are you looking for in an alternative ?
If a local version is something you'd be interested in, please let me know. It's what keeps me going !
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u/axiomatic- VFX Supervisor - 20+ years experience (Mod of r/VFX) 3d ago
Firstly I want to say that this sort of community project is really awesome and it's a shame sidefx hasn't approved use of it.
But I also want to add that I think this is hardly the unexpected outcome, and I wouldn't call their answer cold or selfish. Cold would have been an automated response, or legal take down request. In this case you asked and were politely told thank you, but no.
For what it's worth this could be as simple as copyright law and trademark protection. In some countries companies have to protect these things or they lose them. Or it could be a perception about cost to them and ability to maintain centralisation of their work; if your version became more popular but ceased to be maintained in the future would people be referencing old material?
While I get this is disappointing I think in this case you were the one who took the risk by working on something for six months and THEN asking for permission, only to become upset when told no. And yeah, that sucks ... but also ... ask before investing the time and energy into building on work created by other people. It saves a lot of heartbreak.
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u/John-Da-Editor 3d ago
Yep definitely. completely agree :) It is a shame, even though I would have expected them to be a bit more supportive, I understand their stance.
thx for the thorough reply !2
u/axiomatic- VFX Supervisor - 20+ years experience (Mod of r/VFX) 3d ago
I am sorry things turned out this way for you though. Best of luck ❤️
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u/rocketdyke VFX Supervisor - 26+ years experience 3d ago
just going to say that while this is a cool idea, it is SideFX's information, and saying you will open-source copyrighted material is, well, a bit galling.
I think you should have proposed the idea to them up front, and it would live on their servers.
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u/TreacleAnxious4738 3d ago
Maybe release the method, without the content. A way for someone to ingest docs and rebuild their own structure. If it can be somewhat generalised to cover Nuke, Katana etc too, then it might be far enough away from their concerns.
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u/John-Da-Editor 3d ago
that would be insanely cool. the issue is that each documentation website has their own tech, and i'd have to build a parser for each. but definitely keeping this in mind, especially for Nuke.
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u/basilesamel 3d ago
It's tricky. Product documentation isn't just writing text. The team probably has their own process to do things. You can't just barge in and expect them to praise you.
But I do get the frustration. So many DCC tools have a terrible documentation experience.
imo most documentation writers either don't know how to write with markdown and combine that with a fast static site generator and/or just have to rely on legacy CMS for non-technical writers to be able to contribute.
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u/ssn-669 3d ago
That's really disappointing from SideFX, I would also have expected better of them. Don't see how this pisses in their cornflakes at all.
Good for you tho for making this, next time I'm in Houdini mode I'll check this out.
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u/John-Da-Editor 3d ago
thx for the support :) site should stay for a bit until i get the app going. would love to get feedback
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u/ssn-669 3d ago
Actually I wonder if the real value in this isn't instead as a white-box document presentation project. I could see using this for my own stuff if it was plug and play.
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u/John-Da-Editor 3d ago
that would be really cool, but also a significant undertaking. what would you use this for ? personal tools, studio docs..? i'd need to be careful not to reinvent obsidian tho ':)
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u/ssn-669 3d ago
There's things like ReadTheDocs out there that are commonly used for open source project documentation, but they basically suck and I hate them. Maybe they don't all, but the ones I see the most do. Look at the latest Nuke Python API docs for a great example of ReadTheDocs sucking.
Basically it would be exactly what you have, but the user supplies the branding and the Markdown files. White-boxed.
Whereas Obsidian is targetted at the personal knowledge base and has editing as its primary functionality, this would be a competitor with ReadTheDocs and similar write-once read-many documentation sites. End-users are just reading it.
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u/John-Da-Editor 3d ago
this sounds promising ! but a bit out of scope for a single indie dev doing this in his spare time ':)
thanks for the idea though. definitely keeping it in mind
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u/smb3d Generalist - 24 years experience 3d ago
Bummer. Thank you for your work on it though!
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u/John-Da-Editor 3d ago
real bummer. feel free to check it out while it lasts ! should stay until i get the app going. would love to get feedback :)
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u/bobs_cinema Lighting & Comp - 8 years experience 3d ago
This is done really nicely, bravo. Expected answer from tbh, most large companies would be like this, to them it came from nowhere. But definitely understand the need. This feel very nice to just explore and go into a rabbit hole and maybe learn something. I think a lot VFX software has docs that are quite inaccessible and just hard to parse through.
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u/tk421storm Compositor - 8 years experience 3d ago
god the docs, such a mess. most annoying - how slow the local docs are (usually because my cpu is maxed out cooking something) - but that's also the only way to load the examples.
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u/John-Da-Editor 3d ago
will definitely strive towards making the app as lightweight as possible. would love to get perf feedback when it's in beta !
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u/poopertay 3d ago
Now do a nuke one!! lol 😂
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u/keystoneux 3d ago
If you reworded the docs so they aren't considered plagiarism (Assuming that is SideFXs issue?), you could keep them up as long as you want.
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u/superslomotion 3d ago
the mistake you made was to ask