My school just upgraded the majority of our computer to AMD-64. Sweet computers, but in Windows Houdini 7 is always unable to compile any VEX shaders (and a few other glitches, like the inability to copy nodes). If we boot into Linux, we are then able to properly use VEX shaders, and such - however, every time we save our files it gets corrupted. Every time. I know it has something with the way our school has set up the Linux privledges or something, because this has been an ongoign problem despite the countless versions of Linux the school has made us use, and the countless number of problem reports we have submitted.

Okay well, to make a long story short, someone suggested to me to export my scene file - as opposed to saving it. And I must confess to my Houdini inexperience (hey I'm a student) and confess I don't know how to export (and probably import).

Breaks my heart to hear stuff like that…I assure you whatever problems you're having with the linux setup falls squarely at the feet of the sysadmins there, and there is positively no problem at all to maintain security and yet have files saved properly. There's lots of very large studios that use Linux in their pipeline(to say nothing of small ones like ours ) and this sort of nonsense is usually solved after about 10 minutes of focused research. The releases shouldn't make any significant difference unless they're making you use some gawdawful ancient linux release like RH6.0 or something, which I highly doubt.

Anyway, it sounds like you've complained before, it's out of your hands, and the problem lies with the sysadmin staff and there's not much you can do about it. As far as a workaround, I'm guessing(just guessing) that the problem lies with NFS and how they've configured it. If that is the case, then I would recommend saving your hip files locally, and using another method such as FTP, rcp, or scp to copy them to the main server after the fact. This will make life a lot simpler than the headaches of writing out cmd files(which you use “opscript” in the textport to do, btw). Odds are that saving directly from Houdini over NFS causes the corruption - you may even be able to copy the file over NFS after the fact and it will work.. This problem came up way back in the ancient days of linux porting and hasn't been a problem for a long time. You may want to utter the program name “fam” to your sysadmins and see if that twigs something in them. We don't use or need it, but for a while it solved a lot of NFS sync problems.

Anyway, apart from that, there could be other issues…it's not good that your windows machines weren;t compiling VEX properly - right there that indicates improperly configured machines. All that sort of stuff should be solved before attempting to track down problems. Also, if you *are* saving files locally and they're corrupted, you have some very serious problems and I'd simply solve that otherwise I suspect any other method will fail as well.

Hope this helps…

Cheers,

J.C.

note to self: always read all current posts before posting

Seems like others running AMD64 are hacing windows problems with VEX too. That aspect may be a Houdini issue that SESI needs to address. One wonders if the save/corruption problem is related too…