I have a ragdoll setup and basically all I want is to instantiate a bunch of them, and have them fall onto a pile and collide with each other.

What I've done so far is I have a ragdoll solver -> joint deform -> copy to points, and feeding a single plane into the collision on the ragdoll solver I get this (video [imgur.com])

There's however no collisions between them, because the ragdoll solver is only taking in the single plane



I can't just feed the output of the copy to points back into the ragdoll solver as collision geometry, so it feels that I need a fundamentally different approach?

I've tried googling but can't find anything. The idea here being that instead of having to open up a .blend file in Blender, export it to say FBX/OBJ, and then add a FBX/OBJ import node, one could instead just have a "Blender Import Node", and give it the export parameters in Houdini, and it would then run the Blender export in the background.

Unity used to have something like this (https://docs.unity3d.com/560/Documentation/Manual/HOWTO-ImportObjectBlender.html), although it was removed because it lead to issues when people would share .blend files and have different versions of Blender installed, though that to me seems like just an implementation issue (e.g. no version check/pinning).

I wonder if anyone tried to do this or have any tips? The main thing I want to avoid is just the extra round trip and having to open blender, choose an export path, then choose the same path in Houdini and import, it'd be really nice if this could be done by just pointing Houdini at the .blend file.

I'm not sure if I understand the licensing correctly, but it seems that Houdini Indie license allows installing Houdini itself on two computers, and then I also see "Karma/Mantra tokens", which are 2 of each.

My question is, what kinds of setup does this allow in terms of using more than one computer to render? Can I actually use this to render on the two machines, since I'll be still "one user"?

Let's say I have an animation + some dynamics and I'm on frame 150 and the timeline/playbar is blue/simulated. I'm mainly treating the animation as a way to "get to a result" rather than have it animated, so I'm only interested in that specific frame.

Now say that I've changed some parameter that invalidates the simulation and the timeline turns orange.

Is there some button/hotkey I can press to re-simulate everything while staying on the current frame? What I've been doing until now is just scrub the timeline back and forth, but this sometimes causes unnecessary lag, especially if I have the renderer view open. It'd be nice if I could just tell Houdini "update everything up to this frame".

Coming from Unity I'm trying to recreate a very very simple thing. In Unity I can have an object selected, press F to "home selected object" (a bit like G in Houdini), and then Alt+Drag to "tumble" around the selected object. By tumble I mean what LMB does in houdini, that is rotate the viewport around the object's pivot.

But if I do this in Houdini, that is press G and then LMB drag, the viewport pivots around some point close to where I'd expect it to, but not really, and it seems to change any time I press G. I thought this was dependent on mouse position, but it doesn't seem to be, as in when I center mouse on the center of my donut and press G, it'll still orbit around a point that is not where my mouse is, and also not where the donut's center is.

Here's a little showcase https://imgur.com/a/PUur4DD [imgur.com] of what I mean, but it should be fairly self-explanatory. In contrast, Alt+LMB drag in Unity (which is the same as LMB drag in Houdini) will orbit exactly around the object's center.

It'd be neat if there was a way to do this if nothing else to keyframe camera movement around an object during an animation, tho I've gotten quite used to having this way of moving the viewport. AFAIK Blender behaves the same way as Unity does with its viewport orbit.

I have been getting a bunch more errors on this version as well. Just today woke my pc from sleep and found Houdini to have segfaulted. It wasn't doing anything when I put the pc to sleep, I just had it open and was doing other things. Woke up today, turned on the PC, and found Houdini with a "segmentation fault" crash error (on Windows 11).

I'm running into an issue which is seemingly because the viewport updates at unlimited FPS while moving mouse/camera, which is causing my GPU to be under heavy load, which is causing noise in my speakers. This may seem completely arbitrary to those that haven't seen this, but it's not limited to Houdini, and happens in other 3D applications that don't limit FPS in the viewport, e.g. Unity (in scenes that cause enough load).

Searching around the internet it seems to be a relatively common problem that can be resolved by running things with VSync on, but after looking through Houdini preferences I don't see any option to turn this on.

I should clarify, this only happens when moving the mouse, and it does not happen in frame-limited applications. I'm not sure if this is because the GPU draws a lot of power at peak load (RTX 4090), or if it's something else, but I'm able to reproduce this quite consistently, and even tried two external USB audio interfaces and it happens with both.

I wonder if there's any config for this?