COPout
Welcome! COPout (v1.0) puts a Copernicus network on a projector or a second screen as a borderless, chrome-free output window — no menu bars, no toolbars, nothing of Houdini in the way.
TouchDesigner has the Perform Window. After Effects has Mercury Transmit. Every tool built for live visuals and installation work can put a clean, full-screen image on a second display, because that is how the work gets shown. Houdini has no equivalent — and COPout is it.
Wire a COP Network into the input, press Output COP, and the image goes up on the display you pick, at the network's own resolution. That's the whole idea. Everything else on the node exists to get it aimed, aligned and behaving on the night.
Why it exists
Houdini's Composite View cannot be stripped of its chrome. The entire pane — menu bar, toolbars, footer — is drawn inside a single GL surface, so there is no toolbar to switch off and no setting that removes it. It offers no way to position the image either: no zoom, no pan, nothing. For a projector, an installation or a live set, that's a dead end.
So COPout draws the pixels itself. Which is also why it can offer things the native pane never could — alignment that survives a save, fit modes, flips for rear projection, and a grade on the way out.
What it does
- Three sources. The COP image, a clean 3D viewport, or the viewport drawn over the COP.
- Any screen, any fit. Pick the projector from a dropdown, go fullscreen, and letterbox, crop, 1:1 or stretch.
- Align it by hand, and keep it. Right-drag moves the image, the arrows nudge it a pixel at a time, and the result is saved with the scene — so a projector alignment survives a save and travels with the hip.
- A test pattern that works with nothing wired. Grid, crosshair, aspect circle, colour bars, gamma ramp. Aim and focus the projector before the content exists.
- Blackout. Kill the output to black instantly without tearing anything down — and bring it back just as fast, already current.
- It follows the playbar. Nothing here runs its own clock, so a COP feedback simulation steps exactly when your scene steps.
- A grade on the way out. Exposure and gamma trim, on the GPU, for a projector running dark.
What it does not do
Worth saying plainly, because each one saves a support conversation:
- It does not record or render to file. It is an output window, not a ROP.
- It does not run its own clock. If you want the image moving, something has to be advancing time — play the playbar.
- It drives one output window per node. Two projectors means two nodes.
- The grade is a display trim only. It changes nothing upstream in your network.
The node is a pass-through
COPout does not modify the geometry a COP Network emits — it passes it straight down, so you can keep sampling or rendering the image downstream. Opening the window is a button press, never a side effect of cooking.
Requirements
- Houdini 22.0+, Indie or Apprentice — it ships as
.hdalc - Windows — the only platform it has been tested on
- A Copernicus network in the scene (or nothing at all, if you just want the test pattern)