Hello,

Using Houdini recently has been horrible. It crashes at every turn and feedback from the team is that its the render engines installed i.e redshift & renderman 23.

Can anyone help with how to overcome these issues as its so bad i can hardly do anything with the application. I am almost regretting that i renewed my license.

This is the conf of my houdini env

REDSHIFT_COREDATAPATH = “c:/ProgramData/Redshift”
HOUDINI_DSO_ERROR = 1
PATH = “C:/ProgramData/Redshift/bin;$PATH”
HOUDINI_DSO_ERROR = 2
MOPS=“C:\Users\COUGAR\Documents\MOPS;$PATH”

REDSHIFT_RV_ALWAYSONTOP = 0
REDSHIFT_RV_OPEN_ONLY = 1
PXR_PLUGINPATH_NAME = “$REDSHIFT_COREDATAPATH/Plugins/Solaris/${HOUDINI_VERSION}”
MOPS=“C:\Users\COUGAR\Documents\MOPS;&”

RMANTREE=C:\Program Files\Pixar\RenderManProServer-23.3
RFHTREE=C:\Program Files\Pixar\RenderManForHoudini-23.3

RMAN_PROCEDURALPATH=$RFHTREE\18.0\openvdb;&
HOUDINI_PATH=“C:/ProgramData/Redshift/Plugins/Houdini/18.0.460;$RFHTREE\18.0;&”
PATH=$RMANTREE\bin;&

Your environment file is all over the place. There's a lot of keys that don't make sense… appending “&” to $MOPS for example, in addition to appending $PATH, doesn't make much sense, and then again at the end you're setting a new definition for $PATH without including the original $PATH.

The best way to get these things working together is to start by deleting Houdini.env and replacing it with individual packages, one for each plugin. This way you can add-on one plugin at a time, and enable/disable them separately from each other without needing to edit that same file and worry about adding things together.

I don't have a ready-made Renderman package for you, but I can show you what MOPs and Redshift look like as package configurations. Here's MOPS:


And here's Redshift:

It's more or less the same keys you're setting in Houdini.env, but broken up into a more modular format, and without needing to worry about every last “&” and “@” and all that. You just save those as .JSON files and place them in $HOME/houdiniXX.X/packages.

I wrote a little post about writing packages here: https://www.toadstorm.com/blog/?p=722 [www.toadstorm.com]

And here's the official docs: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/plugins.html [www.sidefx.com]

Here's a tutorial video on Packages based on Henry's informative blog post about them.

In general however I hear nothing but nightmare stories regarding users trying to get Renderman to behave nicely with other renderers. Not saying that it's impossible to do, but I think the loading order plays a role in how well it works when you have multiple render engines.