Hello guys, I hope you're having a great time today.

I am not a super experienced user in Houdini, I started picking it up little over a year ago unfortunately since I am still studying 3d Animation and my major's preference is towards Maya so I can only study and do Houdini every so and then.

I've been using the apprentice version for a while, however I recently (over 2 or 3 months ago) got the 1 year license since I plan on releasing a game eventually with it. Up to date, I've stayed with the Apprentice version since I am working on several computers (because of school); I am still not ready to bring my apprentice files into the commercial version.

All of these computers (my computer at home, and all the computers I've been using in College)) used to handle Houdini just fine a few months ago. However…. A week ago, I decided to start working on Houdini again (but I was planning on finally getting involved in a serious fashion since my thesis is due in a few months and I haven't finished modeling my procedural assets for my game). The problem I am having right now, is that for some reason Houdini keeps on CRASHING. CONSTANTLY. Like seriously bad - it will crash when I add nodes sometimes, it will crash when I SPLIT THE PANES (like, seriously….. what's up with that?). Hell, I'm not even modeling anything serious at the moment! I was practicing my basic concepts of procedural modeling, such as copying curves from one point to the other, merging them into a single object, skinning stuff… blablabla. Nothing too serious, never had more than literally 30 vertexes so I have a hard time believing this is something I am causing myself.

I am really concerned about this since now I feel really cheated - I didn't pay 200 hundred dollars for a program that crashes more than a 10 year old riding a Bus for the first time. I seriously doubt that splitting a pane should crash ANY program - it just seems ridiculous - and I don't see why this would all of a sudden be a problem when it wasn't one at all a few months ago.

I really love the way Houdini works *when it works*, but right now it's just not doing the trick for me. I would really like to keep using this software - hell, I love it - but if even splitting a pane is going to freeze my screen and crash the program every single time I do it, I seriously doubt I'll be doing any more Houdini in the future - no serious software should have issues such as these. I am really not doing ANYTHING complicated. I am not overloading the graphics card with operations or generation of geometry at all - I can't even split a pane tab on a new file without Houdini starting to act like crazy.

I googled my problem but couldn't find much - I am wondering whether this might just be a bug on the current version or not - really hoping it is and that it will get fixed as soon as possible because at the moment I find it impossible to even run the program.

If anyone else is running into this I would be very grateful if I could hear about your experience.

Thanks guys!

I'm running Houdini on win, mac and linux and I don't have crashes more than once a week - and usually because I'm doing something very silly.
I'd say, not knowing anything about your hardware/OS that it's graphics drivers.
In order for us to do anything it's important to log a bug(s), which you can do here:
https://www.sidefx.com/Support/report-a-bugrfe/ [sidefx.com]

two things will really help us:
in Houdini do Help > About Houdini - turn on Show Details
at the bottom of this dialog is a button to save this out as a text file that you can attach to your bur report.
this contain lots of info we use to check out your system
the other thing is steps use to reproduce the bug or crash - tell us, as best you can, the exact steps you took that resulted in a crash - that way we can trace what Houdini is doing.

If you'd like some help, please let us know what Houdini version you're using, along with your Operating System, graphics card, and graphics driver version. Any crashlogs you get in the temp directory would be helpful as well.

Have you submitted a bug report? It looks like the new bug submission form isn't available yet, but there's a link to the old form on that page: http://archive.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=768&Itemid=239 [archive.sidefx.com]

If you can, please be sure to open Houdini, go to Help > About Houdini > Show Details, and copy all of that text into the bug report. If possible, please clearly describe a sequence of steps that reliably crashes for you.

My heuristic guess, based on what many other first-time forum posters hitting crashes experience, is that it's a graphics driver issue. There are some really bad graphics drivers out there, especially on Mac, and there's a ton of special-case code in Houdini just to work around bugs in the graphics drivers. If you've updated your OS or graphics drivers in the past few months, that could be a contributing factor. Graphics driver instability is not something unique to Houdini, as looking through forums for other 3D software suggests, but it is OS and graphics card-specific, so not everybody hits the same crashes when doing the same things, and the cases where two different programs hit the same bug may be different. On Mac, after switching to OpenGL 3+, a number of programs have run into the same graphics driver problems that Houdini tends to hit. The OpenGL 2 graphics drivers on Mac were a bit more stable, but the OpenGL 3+ drivers have been a neverending source of problems. There have also been issues with particular cards or driver versions on other operating systems, so you may just have to switch driver version, if that's what you're hitting.

Amazing how fast you guys are suggesting things. I'm glad the support is so good because I really want to stick with Houdini.

I am back at home now where I still have an older version of Houdini (the different computers I've been experiencing this crash on back in college are all up to date). I've tried reproducing the crashes back at home and I am not getting any so everything seems to be fine here.

I know Houdini was working fine in these college computers I just mentioned 2 or 3 months ago since I didn't have these problems and I know they haven't changed the GPUs but I can check as soon as I am able to meet with our technician to see what they're running and what the drivers are to give you guys more information.


The steps to reproduce are really simply splitting any pane. That by itself crashed or froze Houdini (in these College computers). The same would occur after a few minutes of using it even if I didn't split the pane tab, but essentially just splitting the panes would freeze the program or crash it, even on a new file, with nothing on it yet. I split the panes with both the interface and with keyboard commands and both methods presented the same problem although for some reason somehow using keyboard commands seemed to generate longer periods of freezing.

Thank you so much for your support and will keep you up to date about the subject

what windows version are You using?
one time the update of win 10 caused serious issues,it did not even start anymore
but a new build fixed that

did You try a newer build of houdini?

Houdini will get crashy when the available memory, either disk or RAM, starts to get full. Take a look at the available memory on those machines.
Otherwise, that's one helluva rant.