I have H17 Indie license, with installs on my desktop Mac pro and my laptop for lighterweight but “always available” Houdini practice.

Curiously on my laptop the Mantra renderer does not work, it says “Generating Scene..” forever.

Is the rendering not supposed to work - per licensing - on the new secondary install (thank you SideFX by the way for that) of an Indie license or is something else off ?

My laptop is a Mid 2015 Macbook Pro with 16GB, running 10.13.6 - not a memory issue, H17 only uses 500MB on a single sphere scene, plenty left over. CPU also not busy.

Rendering should work on your second machine. One thing to check: the mantra license is separate from the houdini license, you need to have both installed to render.

If you log in to your sidefx website account you can see a list of your available and installed licenses. If you see an available Renderer (Indie/Apprentice) license key, install it from the license manager application on your laptop. If you do not see the additional licenses there then you should email sidefx support directly.

RESOLVED: thank you, indeed that was the problem, no renderer license installed on my Macbook.

For some reason, two identical renderer licenses were installed on my desktop (how that would make sense and not cause some kind of message is a mystery to me)

And perhaps that silently caused the install on my Macbook to forego installation of a renderer license (also quietly, no message)

And finally the renderer similarly fails quietly without a message (or actually it hangs)

I handed back the renderer license on the Desktop and then installed it on the laptop. Now Mantra is working on the laptop also.

Anyway, resolved, thank you to jandress and the forum for answers in general. The licensing system in particular has been a source of frustration in the past also…but I am learning