

Any changes you make are stored in the hip, the equivalent of making reference edits in maya. The padlock goes red, dive inside and it no longer dimmed, you can edit away. If you want to make changes you can go back to the top of the hda, r.click and choose Allow editing of contents. If you dive inside the hda when the padlock is gray you'll see the nodes inside are dimmed you're literally locked out of making edits. In maya reference terms red means you might've made reference edits, gray means you've made no changes. Red means its unlocked and you might've made a local change, gray means its locked and matches the definition on disk. reverting any changes (the maya equivalent of deleting all reference edits).push those changes out of your hip and into the hda on disk (the equivalent of opening a second maya, opening the reference, editing and saving it).make modifications to the hda in the hip (the equivalent of maya reference edits).Now you have an HDA, you can do a few things with it: Lock states, editing and saving and reverting hdas Kiran points out an even easier method than drag and dropping parameters is to hold down alt + middle click the parameter and it will automatically add to the type properties. They'll be automatically channel referenced onto the top of the hda, super handy. The simple trick here is to put the dialog to one side, dive into your hda subnet, select nodes, and drag and drop parameters you want to control directly into the 'existing parameters' region.

This is for you to customise the interface. Houdini shows you the Edit operator type dialog.

Also be clear about the save location, if its just for you, fine, put it in your home folder, but you probably want to put it somewhere more public if its to share with others. The default is to prefix with your username, I usually remove that.
