Just switched from Houdini 12.0.581 to 12.0.636 windows vc9 x64 and for me the Sky Light seems to be broken. I just place a sphere and add a sky light which results in a crash or a hang/freeze which eats quite some ram ( around 20 gig ).
In 581 the same thing works perfect. I think there is no sense to post a scene. Its quite easy to reproduce.

dulo
Just switched from Houdini 12.0.581 to 12.0.636 windows vc9 x64 and for me the Sky Light seems to be broken. I just place a sphere and add a sky light which results in a crash or a hang/freeze which eats quite some ram ( around 20 gig ).
In 581 the same thing works perfect. I think there is no sense to post a scene. Its quite easy to reproduce.

Is it mantra or Houdini that crashes?

I think that Houdini now tries to display the environment map in the viewport. What graphics card do you have? What drivers?

Its the hmaster process which crashed ( the whole interface freezes ). I use a quadro fx 3800 with the latest driver ( 296.70 )

Just checked again. It happens immediately after adding the sky light before I active IPR or do a rendering. I am working with opengl 3.2 viewport without any troubles till now.

One interesting fact is that I can add a skylight into an empty scene but if i add a sphere afterwards it freezes for some time and then dies with a segmentation fault.

Even more interesting .. I can trick it to work. If I add the skylight into empy scene and then do an IPR window on the empty scene and the add a sphere it does work and I can see the environment map in opengl without troubles.
But as soon as I try : add light, add sphere -> crash
but again : add light, IPR, add sphere -> works