ndickson
Thanks for checking so thoroughly! Can you post the OBJ file? It might be something in the file that's currently unsupported.

ndickson
Hmm… the STL file you linked to loads fine for me in Houdini 16.0.764 (after extracting it, of course).

All I can think of at the moment is that it might be a permissions issue. Try running Houdini as administrator, i.e. right-click Run as Administrator, (even if your account is an Administrator account, Windows 10 sometimes-but-not-always seems to not treat the account as having Administrator permissions).

chrism
Just a shot in the dark here….do you actually have a directory at c:/home? I've noticed we often give an ‘unable to read’ error message when what it should really say is ‘file not found’, which is generally more helpful in these kind of situations.

ndickson
Okay, let's try something a bit different. Can you put down a box, (Ctrl+click on the Box button on the toolbar), then dive into SOPs (double-click on the object node that was created in the network editor), and right-click > Save > Geometry. Click on the file chooser button, navigate to the directory containing the other OBJ file, and type “test.obj” for a filename, hit Accept, then Accept again. Then try pressing Tab, type File, press Enter twice. Then, choose that file with the file chooser on the File SOP that was just created. Does that file load?

Enivob
I remember experiencing something like this a while back and I believe the solution was in the houdini.env file.

Can you post your houdini.env?

#
# Houdini Environment Settings
#
# The contents of this file are read into the environment
# at startup.  They will override any existing entries in
# the environment.
#
# The syntax is one entry per line as follows:
#    VAR = VALUE
#
# Values may be quoted
#    VAR = "VALUE"
#
# Values may be empty
#    VAR = 
#

# Example:
#
# HOUDINI_NO_SPLASH = 1

ndickson
This may be a long shot, but can you try setting the environment variable TBBMALLOC_PROXY_ENABLEto 0and try again?

(A few Windows 10 updates in recent months have broken compatibility for what the memory allocator in Intel's TBB library uses to replace the default memory allocator, sometimes just resulting in another place that they need to patch-in to work in every case, so it might be another case of that.)

ndickson
Okay, one last try for now:

0) Open start menu, type cmd, right-click Command Prompt, “Run as administrator”
1) Run cd "C:\home"
2) Run "C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 16.0.XXX\bin\gwavefront.exe" lens.obj lens.bgeowhere XXX is the build number of Houdini 16.0 you're using.

What's the output from that? Does it print some text on the command line, or does it successfully create lens.bgeo in that directory?

ndickson
Interesting… a few more questions:

A) Does doing that same conversion with gwavefront.exework if the command prompt is started without the “Run as administrator”?
B) Does it work if you specify gconvert.exeinstead of gwavefront.exe? (I think gconvert will try to launch gwavefront to load the OBJ file)
C) If you run houdini.exe from the command prompt and try to load an OBJ file, does anything get printed to the command line?

ndickson
Very interesting… Thanks for bearing with these questions! This may sound unrelated, but if you open Houdini, put down a box (Ctrl+click on the Box button), then switch to Render View and hit the Render button, does it render the box?

(I'm wondering if, for some unknown reason, Houdini-related processes are somehow unable to start any other processes.)