When opening the Redshift Renderview in Houdini, the default action upon opening is to start an interactive render.  Depending on your scene, this may not be ideal.

While I’m working, I will often close the RenderView to give me more screen space, so I found quite annoying that every time I reopened the window it would launch a render, when a lot of times I only really wanted to reference a saved render.  Also, minimizing the window covers the Houdini status bar, so also not ideal, especially when waiting for sims or long Houdini cooks to resolve as you can’t see the text.

Luckily, while reading through the Redshift forums, I found a solution to this.  It seems like there are a number of undocumented options that can be enabled to change the default behavior of the RenderView, nice!  I am just going to focus on two for now.

To implement these, add the following two lines to your houdini.env file:

REDSHIFT_RV_OPEN_ONLY = 1
REDSHIFT_RV_ALWAYSONTOP = 0

The first will open the RenderView only, and not start an interactive render. 
The second will change the Always On Top state.  While I do see this option toggling the state of the button (RenderView->Houdini->Always on Top), I don’t actually see any change, so either way the RenderView is always on top.  Oh well, maybe in a future release this will work properly.

I’ve tested this in both Redshift 2.6.52 and Redshift 3.0.16, and in Houdini 17.5.425 and 18.0.348.

Hope you find this helpful.

Posted: 03/2020