I'm not looking for any fix for this, but I thought it worth mentioning in case anyone else experiences the same thing…

Since H17, I've been experiencing complete system crashes on my iMac Pro when working in Houdini… It will happen if or when I do something (often by mistake) possibly memory or geometry heavy, an intensive task that you might expect would crash an application. It's usually something done by accident, like creating too much geometry, but it has also happened when doing fairly innocuous things. Whatever the cause, for the entire system to cut-out to black screen is highly unusual… The beachball will start spinning, then around 10 seconds later the Mac will just cut out to black screen and switch off…

I just wanted to mention it in case anyone else has experienced the same thing. At the moment I don't know whether it's limited to this model of Mac in particular or whether H17 is actually to blame in any way, shape or form… All I can say is that it's only started happening very recently, and it's only ever happened when I've been working in H17.

… and just on a side note completely unrelated to Houdini… I've also noticed glitches with the sound on this iMac Pro, it's like someone tapping a live microphone … Some people have attributed this to the T2 chip, whatever that is… I only mention it because it's something that, although happens every now and then, will always happen just before the system cuts out as mentioned above …

… and if anyone knows what to look for, here's the crash report that the Mac OS presents you with immediately after the restart…

This might not apply to you, but I have found that 9 out of 10 times that I have some weirdly mysterious crash and/or overall weird functionality on a Mac I can trace it down to some sort of permissions issue. For instance for the longest time I thought Redshift was one of the buggiest apps ever on the Mac, then I changed the read/write permissions in the Cache to Everyone and now Redshift is rock solid. Same thing with Houdini, couldn't update my Orbolt purchases…wouldn't you know it? Changing the Library/Houdini folder to give Everyone read/write permissions did the trick!