I am using Houdini 16.0.671 QT4 on a brand new macbook pro 2017 (specs below) and every time I try to render something, Houdini is generating the scene forever. Even the simplest of renders takes a very long time.
Rendering a simple primitive sphere with a default principled shader material with the color tweaked took
an astonishing 22 seconds to generate. 22 seconds to generate and approx. 3 seconds to render.
The computer should be more than enough to render a simple sphere faster than that.

If i pause the render and do changes, it does not have to generate the scene but at the cost of computer speed.

Does anyone know why this is happening or have run into same problem?

Submitting a small hip with the primitive sphere example state above.

//Simon

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017)

macOS Sierra 10.12.5 (16F2073)

2,9 GHz Intel Core i7

16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3

Radeon Pro 560 4096 MB
Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 MB

Update!

It seems to be a somewhat fixed amount of time on generating the scene.
I tried it on another project that is considerably heavier and it took 22 seconds as well.

Does the delay go away when running mantra with ‘-e none’?

jsmack
Does the delay go away when running mantra with ‘-e none’?

Hey!

I don't know what that is or where to apply that to the mantra node. Could you please explain?

On the Mantra ROP, look under the Driver tab:

goldleaf
On the Mantra ROP, look under the Driver tab:

Hey,

I'm sorry. I am pretty new to Houdini and I honestly don't know what you mean.
Should I write ‘-e none’ in the command box or where?
I'm not following.

No problem, sorry I wasn't clearer; yeah, replace mantrawith mantra -e none.

I also noticed on another thread [www.sidefx.com], some Mac-suggested environment variables for better performance. One that might be applicable here, is add this to your houdini.env [www.sidefx.com]:


On a Mac, it's ~/Library/Preferences/houdini/X.X/houdini.env, where X.X would be 16.0 in this case.

Thanks for explaining. It did not help unfortunately…

I am trying the fix with the environment variables but I can't find the file. Very frustrating.
Even searching for the houdini.env doesn't give any results.

It is just not meant for me to use Houdini on this machine!

Don't give up, the MacBook Pros are a bit of a hassle with Houdini, it's not just you!

You might need to create the file if it doesn't exist, maybe that's why it's not showing up in the search.

Can you find your Houdini preferences folder? It's ~/Library/Preferences/houdini/16.0(in case Unix shells are new to you that ~ is your $HOME directory.

After confirming you can find the folder, open TextEdit, make sure you are inPlain Text Mode through the menuFormat > Make Plain Text, then Save As… and save it to ~/Library/Preferences/houdini/16.0/houdini.env. Now that the file exists, paste that environment variable in there, save, and try launching Houdini again.

I'm going off memory a bit, as my Mac died a while back, and I haven't had the chance to replace it yet…

I finally managed to find the file. It just randomly popped up. Great.

I did set those variables but it actually made things worse in terms of the rendering.
So I suppose I am screwed until further notice.

Hurray for MacBook “Pro”!

Thanks for your help!

hey Guys,

Anyone would recommend the new Apple MacBook Pro 15" (2017) for 3D work?

I work on Houdini and Cinema 4D with Arnold render, is that will be useful for heavy work?

thanks in advance

aliadel
Anyone would recommend the new Apple MacBook Pro 15" (2017) for 3D work?

It's limited to 16GB ram, so no. MacOS OpenGL/CPU OCL and QT 4/5 is also not very good or doesn't work but you should be able to run Linux/Windows on the hardware, which would improve it's value significantly.