Hi there,

I'm trying to open the building_v001.hip file from the Next Steps: Lesson 3 in Houdini FX 12.5 build 376. The file loads, the sops start cooking and Houdini crashes with the following messages:

A memory allocation occurred, probably due to insufficient memory.

6192: Fatal error: Segmentation Fault

I'm using a Lenovo X220 laptop with 8gb of RAM and Windows 7 Professional 64 bit. Nothing else is running.

Even when I escape out before the nodes start cooking, as soon as I dive into the window_maker digital asset Houdini crashes.

Given the amount of RAM I have, it seems like I shouldn't have a problem. Does anyone have suggestions?

Thanks!

Intel HD Graphics can be hit and miss, though the only reason I can see that being a problem when diving into an asset is if it displays something(s) that are too much for the gpu to handle.

One thing to try is running houdini with the -n flag (from the command line tools), which will open Houdini in no-cook mode (which you can make sure is toggled in the lower right of the ui), which should let you dive in and inspect the asset, since it won't trigger cooking. Then you can disable nodes, and manually update, and see if it's a specific one that's causing it.

I am able to open it up; I'm running 12.5.372 on Linux though. I would wonder if it's a graphics card/driver issue…

Great suggestion. So I tried running Houdini in manual update mode as you suggested. However the first view in that file is of a giant building with many, many instances of a digital asset displayed.

So I kept crashing. And weirdly, the nodes STILL cooked when I opened up the file - the mode switched from manual to autoupdate for some reason without my interference.

Is there a setting saved with hipc files that would override the manual update setting?

Nonetheless I opened the file on a desktop PC, saved out a version without the building displayed and it ended up loading fine on my laptop. Thus you're right about the IntelHD graphics being the issue.

Thanks very much for your help (and if you do know what's going on with the switch to autoupdate on a file load, I'd be grateful for a solution.)!

I think that setting can be saved into the hip file, but if you open it from command line with the flag, it shouldn't cook. Another idea would be to, again from command line, pass the -d (or whatever it is) arg to give it a Desktop that doesn't have a 3d view, see if that at least will give you a chance to set the manual update, since it doesn't want to respect the flag…

Hi, gronk33, the command line is
houdini -n

-n: start up in Never cook mode