I wrote a python script that runs through each camera I have and renders each lighting pass for each object in that shot. When I run the script it begins rendering….when I return a few hours later the screen has the following error message:

The attempted operation failed.

Error: Failed to save output to file “Could not open file D:\Program~1\SIDEEF~1\HOUDIN~1.374\houdini\soho\IFD.py”

There is also a console window open at the bottom of the screen that says the following:
Event Queue Full: Events being dropped:
UI_EVENT_TIMER to UI_Manager

I can close the console window - but houdini is locked up tight and won't let me even close the error window.

I know the script is working and that it cuts out part way through the renders because the I usually have several image files saved to the HD. For example I might be rendering 200 frames for each light and it will process the first two or three lights and then part way through processing the renders for the next light it craps out.

I'm running the script on Houdini 10.0.374.

I've tried to run it on two different machines both a 32 bit and 64 bit and it gives the same error. Although it apears to do it at different times in the render batch - which makes me think it is some kind of memory problem…but both of the machines I'm running it on have plenty of memory to spare.

Has anyone ever run across this or know what could be causing it?

It sounds like you're running into an overflow of UI events while running your script but there is no one to consume them.

Try running something like this at the end of each pass in your script to force the UI events to be consumed periodically.
hou.hscript(“updateui”)

This is just a total guess, it may not help at all (or make things worst) but it's worth a try.

well I gave that a try and it didn't make any difference…any other ideas?

You still get those Event Queue Full messages? I don't know then.

I'm seeing some sort of problem where ROPs fired off from the main GUI fail after around 800-900 frames which seems to be related to running out of file descriptors (10.0.374 Ubuntu9.04). I wonder if it's related ?

-Drew