I'm a noob at houdini, just trying out the beta, so I'm probably missing some really easy debug output that developers will want.

I'm trying to render a simple liquid sim and mantra is frequently crashing. I'm using build 725 on Windows XP. My scene contains: a sphere converted to liquid, a static rigidbody torus, a ground plane, 2 lights, camera. When it crashes I get the “send report to microsoft” popup. It happens at different points in the render each time, and sometimes it gets through the render without crashing. It will even crash at different points without any change to the scene/camera, I just click render again as soon as it crashes. I'm on a dual proc box, and I can see the renderer crash one thread at a time. If I'm rendering to MPlay I can see it skip one block of the image when the error pops up, and the other thread continues rendering blocks.

It seems to crash a lot with the default basic_liquid shader and not as much with basic_surface applied to the fluid.


I get this message pretty frequently and haven't determined if it's related… seems to me a license issue would prevent the render from starting in the first place.

No licenses could be found to run this application.
Please check for a valid license server host

This one is pretty frequent too and probably a better hint of the problem. I do try to open files that are rendering sometimes. Maybe that could cause this?

IMG_TileWrite::socketWrite: No such file or directory
mantra: Error writing data to image device

I found a checkbox about NaN detection, which generates output like this, but does not appear to be related to the crashes.

opshop/basic_liquid/liquid.vex NAN detected
ngather@LIVV writing to _vop_trace_hitOf_-v
ngather@LIVV writing to _vop_trace_hitOf_-v
ngather@LIVV writing to _vop_trace_hitOf_-v
ngather@LIVV writing to _vop_trace_hitOf_-v

and I got this just once, as a pop up containing the text

Exception happened during processing of request from ('127.0.0.1', 3595)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “C:\PROGRA~1\SIDEEF~1\HOUDIN~1.725\python\lib\python2.5\SocketServer.py”, line 222, in handle_request
self.process_request(request, client_address)
File “C:\PROGRA~1\SIDEEF~1\HOUDIN~1.725\python\lib\python2.5\SocketServer.py”, line 241, in process_request
self.finish_request(request, client_address)
File “C:\PROGRA~1\SIDEEF~1\HOUDIN~1.725\python\lib\python2.5\SocketServer.py”, line 254, in finish_request
self.RequestHandlerClass(request, client_address, self)
File “C:\PROGRA~1\SIDEEF~1\HOUDIN~1.725\python\lib\python2.5\SocketServer.py”, line 521, in __init__
self.handle()
File “C:\PROGRA~1\SIDEEF~1\HOUDIN~1.725\python\lib\python2.5\wsgiref\simple_server.py”, line 130, in handle
self.raw_requestline = self.rfile.readline()
File “C:\PROGRA~1\SIDEEF~1\HOUDIN~1.725\python\lib\python2.5\socket.py”, line 345, in readline
data = self._sock.recv(self._rbufsize)
error: (10054, ‘Connection reset by peer’)
Unknown command: —————————————-
Unknown command: —————————————-
Unknown command: Exception
Unknown command: —————————————-
UT_NetPacket::read: No error

I'm attaching a file that I can get to crash after a couple minutes of rendering. Sorry this is a really inconsistent bug. If you need more info I'll be glad to help.

Trying to open the rendering frame in a viewer while rendering a sequence does cause the renderer to stop after finishing the frame. I tried that with only a couple primitives, no fluid or dynamics. It doesn't pop up the windows crash dialog though, and I'm pretty sure it's a different problem from the crash that causes the dialog to appear.

Make sure your Max Processors is turned off inside your Mantra. That is a known bug in Windows. It will randomly crash anything and everything.

It will give you one black box and sometimes continue to render the frame.

This might be a far fetched but also a possibility, is using the official bittorrent client:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=9654 [sidefx.com]

moonlightkiss
Make sure your Max Processors is turned off

Thanks, I'm going to go with this solution for now. Looks like the crash also happens when Max is off but Thread Count is 2. Can I change the default values of these so new mantras will automatically use only 1 proc?

Yes, you can change it so it's your permanent defaults

In your mantra go to the parameter pane. Click on the gear in the right-hand corner and the 6th option is “Save as Permanent Defaults.” There's also options to make it a preset and restore the defaults. Good luck!

pgraham

moonlightkiss
Make sure your Max Processors is turned off

Thanks, I'm going to go with this solution for now. Looks like the crash also happens when Max is off but Thread Count is 2. Can I change the default values of these so new mantras will automatically use only 1 proc?

Just turn off Max Processors & set the Thread Count to 1 which is the default.

Cheers!
steven

Apparently, “save as permanent defaults” doesn't work, or it doesn't do what I expect. When I make a new mantra through the render menu or the tab menu it still has max procs checked on, and if I changed other properties like sampling, they're factory default as well. Also “revert to defaults” doesn't change the value of any property, either to the version I saved or to factory default.