Houdini IAN Notify Tool

Description

This tool allows you to safely alt-tab to a different window while Houdini is processing a node change or cooking.
It's something that I found myself doing a lot lately, the moment Houdini takes a longer time to process something, I alt tab and get lost in endless scrolling or just simply wait with no visual/audio cue its done. (Yes I have a golden retriever attention span)

So here comes my tool that I've been using for a while now... its a toast notification tool that installs its dependent python library, you can customize it and add an icon and an audio cue to it if you want. I personally use a sound notification as well as a funny warcraft 3 peon as my personal assistant toaster.

Parameters

* Title: The notification title text.

* Message: The main notification message.

* Toggle Audio: Enable or disable sound playback.

* Audio Path: Path to the local sound file .

* Toggle Icon: Enable or disable icon display.

* Icon Path: Path to the icon file (ICO or PNG).

Usage

Fill in the parameters and add the HDA at the end of your network or where you want to be notified houdini "passed" that node.

The sound and icon will only play/show if their toggles are enabled.

Troubleshoot

* Make sure the audio and icon paths are valid local paths.

* Check file permissions to ensure Houdini can read them.

* If the toast doesn't appear, verify the 'win11toast' Python package is installed.

Updates

1. 17/07/25 - Released tool version 1.4 (main release)
2. 18/07/25 - Released version 1.5 which should fix the python sop transforming into a merge node.