I just purchased a copy of Houdini Indie and I'm going through the Houdini essentials training series on Lynda.com. So when I went to save the scene as a .hip file, the interface pops up to allow you to name your scene but when I click on it to use it, it's completely unresponsive, frozen. I go to click on cancel and nothing, the whole interface is stuck, every time and in ever version of Houdini. I have to go over to my other screen and open force quite to get out of it. I'm thinking this may be an El Captain issue. But I'm not sure. Has any one using Houdini on a Mac with OS X 10.11 experienced this?

Many low-end Macs don't meet the minimum requirements to run Houdini. Can you post your hardware specs? For instance you need a non-intel graphics card with at least 2Gb of vRam to run Houdini.

Sure, here they are:

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac15,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 3.3 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Boot ROM Version: IM151.0207.B06
SMC Version (system): 2.22f16

AMD Radeon R9 M290:

Chipset Model: AMD Radeon R9 M290
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 2048 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x6819
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-C408A0-729
EFI Driver Version: 01.00.729
Displays:
iMac:
Display Type: Retina LCD
Resolution: 5120 x 2880 Retina
Retina: Yes
Pixel Depth: 30-Bit Color (ARGB2101010)
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Built-In: Yes

I also have 32GB of Ram coming this weekend which will max out the Ram my iMac is rated for?

I am using Houdini 15.5 on my MacMINI running El Capitan so I don't think it is OSX related. Your machine seems to be up to spec for video card. The only other thing you might want to try is to run Disk Utility and check your disk for problems. A lockup on save might still be related to a bad sector on the disk.

Can you do a save on the default empty scene?
Maybe try saving to a USB drive just as a test..?
Do you have any strange non-english characters in your system user name?

PaulTurcott
I just purchased a copy of Houdini Indie and I'm going through the Houdini essentials training series on Lynda.com. So when I went to save the scene as a .hip file, the interface pops up to allow you to name your scene but when I click on it to use it, it's completely unresponsive, frozen. I go to click on cancel and nothing, the whole interface is stuck, every time and in ever version of Houdini. I have to go over to my other screen and open force quite to get out of it. I'm thinking this may be an El Captain issue. But I'm not sure. Has any one using Houdini on a Mac with OS X 10.11 experienced this?

Try in the preferences set the ‘File Choosers’ to ‘Native Chooser Only’, under General User Interface

Hey thanks for responding Artye and Enivob. So, I did switch to the setting ‘Native Choosers Only’ in the preference settings under general and it's still misbehaving. I just maxed out my memory today to 32GB and cleared 400GB of old crap off my machine.

I also started from the Houdini terminal script and I get this error code:

Last login: Sat Jun 11 15:48:15 on ttys000
Pauls-iMac:~ paulturcott$ /Applications/Houdini\ 15.5.502/Houdini\ Indie.app/Contents/MacOS/hindie ; exit;
libpng error: Not a PNG file

I'm wondering if it could be something in the info.plist file.

No sure what the info.plist has to do with this but try renaming or removing ~/Library/Preferences/houdini/15.5

Huh…this is interesting, no preference files were created by Houdini on installation, nor is there anything in Application support, or the cashe folder. I'm not sure why that would be. There's nothing there for Cinema 4D either but it works fine.

That's sounds like you're at the root level - the library folder for Houdini is from the home directory, i.e. ‘~’

Try holding down the option key and in the Finder use the Go menu, the library folder will appear in the menu with the option key pressed, it's hidden by Apple - then navigate to /Preferences/houdini/15.5.

Hi Paul,

Any chance you have a network folder mounted on your machine? I could see a scenario where a network mount is unresponsive causing the file chooser dialog to freeze because it is timing out to connect to the folder's host machine.

Cheers,
Rob

Thank you rvinluan. No I don't have an HQ network mounted for a farm or anything like that though I'm working on getting there. However, when I downloaded v15.5.503, it was highlighted in yellow so it's been having some problems. So still not sure what's causing it, it's really quite mysterious.

So SideFX discovered what it is. In the Preference settings you have to set the file chooser to Houdini only. The other Choices will make Houdini Crash. So I can save my scene files now!