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Houdini Lounge » NVidia Digits


drew: 121 posts; Offline

Jan. 6, 2025 23:40:54

A stack of these could make for a decent small Karma renderfarm! Assuming the software ran on what I assume will be ARM Linux.

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-puts-grace-blackwell-on-every-desk-and-at-every-ai-developers-fingertips [nvidianews.nvidia.com]

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Technical Discussion » Vulkan Viewport and macOS silicon ?


drew: 121 posts; Offline

July 18, 2024 01:42:57

Why don't you have the luxury? It would make no difference if Houdini was written in Julia. You'd still have all the same problems having the software running optimally on all the platforms. In fact Julia being so immature you'd have a vast number of far more mundane problems as well. Don't underestimate the difficulty of writing large software systems, in practice pushing the bounds of computation is insanely hard. Even with Julia on a Mac

It's taken 27 years for Houdini to arrive at it's current sophistication. And the devs don't have a blind spot, it's your job to adapt the (incredibly flexible) tool to your use. Most current systems "pushing the bounds of computation" are developed in fortran and C/C++, sometimes scripted from python. I.e. just like Houdini and AI training. But I'd also note that pushing the bounds of computation is not the same thing as building complex DCC tools like Houdini.

PHENOMDESIGN
drew
choose your hardware and OS to support your software

In my "Industry" we do not have that luxury. It is standard to use a literate programming language closer to the math and plain language such as Julia and compile to the specific platform.

The "Software" should handle this abstraction. Apple platforms performance is so students can learn, other researchers can on-board, and scientific systems can be crafted for immediate implementation using physics-based learning.

I think that there is a really big blind spot in understanding that Houdini is used in vital and mission critical systems design scenarios of which push the boundaries of computation. One application with the new rigging system is applied medical animation research.

Like I posted earlier from Steve Jobs:

Steve Jobs Interview 1981
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbfejwP1d3c&t=496s [www.youtube.com]

" -- Interviewer asks -- "
Is there any basis for comparing you to say Mattel and Atari, or is that like comparing Apples to Oranges?
""

" -- Steve Jobs -- "
We describe our business as making tools not toys....other people are interested in an entertainment value, which is valuable of course too, but that is not our business.
""

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Technical Discussion » Vulkan Viewport and macOS silicon ?


drew: 121 posts; Offline

July 17, 2024 20:05:19

I'm sorry but wouldn't it be reasonable to expect one of the largest and richest companies in the world to have rock solid support for industry standard graphics APIs? Consider bringing this up with your Apple representative. In the meantime choose your hardware and OS to support your software.

Edited by drew - July 17, 2024 20:18:04

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Houdini Lounge » Houdini on Wayland Linux


drew: 121 posts; Offline

May 9, 2024 22:43:08

It's worth checking out https://vfxplatform.com/linux/ [vfxplatform.com] if you're interested in linux distros.

In particular watch https://youtu.be/lA0dZMhqlSo?t=1388 [youtu.be]

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3rd Party » Houdini Docker - Containerize & automate Houdini installs


drew: 121 posts; Offline

April 13, 2023 01:56:18

Hi Aaron,

Really interested in this work, and timely as I'm currently trying to automate building a hqueue farm. In the past I've done it with cobbled together scripts and files shared via NFS mounts, but now that hqueue has python3 support it's time to modernise.

At the moment I get this error if I try and run houdini with your container. Hython and hscript work fine. I'm running on Ubuntu 22.04. (For my purposes I'll mostly be running headless tasks.)

root@539d5b0c2631:/opt/hfs19.5# houdini
/opt/hfs19.5/bin/houdini-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libsmime3.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Cheers,
Drew

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Houdini Lounge » Houdini 20 Rumors


drew: 121 posts; Offline

Nov. 30, 2022 23:45:48

liberalarts
Sure. But could Houdini learn from other software? Yes. Could Houdini be more user friendly? Hell yes.

The other question to ask here is could Blender's UI be extended to provide the vastly more complex and deep functionality of Houdini and still be "user friendly"? I'm going to suggest the answer is no.

These arguments always remind me of this great talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 [www.youtube.com]

-Drew

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Houdini Lounge » Houdini for a Met Office


drew: 121 posts; Offline

Dec. 15, 2021 02:38:30

Well Houdini plus someone who can drive it could definitely be an asset

See here for a few examples of large weather simulations visualized.

https://vimeo.com/user100884632 [vimeo.com]

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Houdini Lounge » H19 unable to launch on Ubuntu 20.4 with Qt Error


drew: 121 posts; Offline

Dec. 6, 2021 18:02:08

For the record, this was fixed with "sudo apt-get install --reinstall libxcb-xinerama0".

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Houdini Lounge » Houdini 19 doesn't load AT ALL on Ubuntu 21.10


drew: 121 posts; Offline

Dec. 6, 2021 00:23:34

This fixed the problem for us, except we were having it with Ubuntu 20.04/h19 (h18.5 was working ok). Curious to know how/where you found this fix? I wasted quite a few hours reinstalling nVidia drivers and other futzing around.

Cheers
Drew

kubo-von
mariusz8
In my case this fix is not working:
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: eglfs, linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, vnc, wayland-egl, wayland, wayland-xcomposite-egl, wayland-xcomposite-glx, webgl, xcb.

Ubuntu 21.10

That's a different error though.
You have to do
sudo apt-get install --reinstall libxcb-xinerama0
to fix this one.

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Houdini Lounge » Any rumours of Houdini 19?


drew: 121 posts; Offline

Oct. 20, 2021 00:19:41

Daryl Dunlap
Well, with the Arnold 7 launch, it reminded me, that Houdini only has partial NanoVDB support, I wondered if SideFX improved NanoVDB support in H19?

NanoVDB is still being developed and hasn't made it into the main OpenVDB distribution yet so it's going to be hard for any application to expose it fully till that happens.

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Houdini Lounge » Any rumours of Houdini 19?


drew: 121 posts; Offline

Aug. 23, 2021 20:50:54

MaterialX in H19...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK9_PLWv4eM&t=1771s [www.youtube.com]

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PDG/TOPs » Python Script TOP node will only cook on a single HQ client


drew: 121 posts; Offline

March 8, 2021 20:38:32

Check what python executable is set. If it's hython you may be limited by houdini licenses.

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Technical Discussion » VDB files that will not load into Houdini


drew: 121 posts; Offline

March 8, 2021 20:25:10

I'm not seeing the same behaviour ...

-Drew

Edited by drew - March 8, 2021 20:25:58

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Technical Discussion » Why is CPU and GPU not fully utilized in OpenCL simulations?


drew: 121 posts; Offline

Jan. 29, 2021 22:29:27

It could be as simple as the task being memory bandwidth limited, to the CPU and/or GPU. And for the GPUs in particular many tasks have components that are inherently scalar and hence can't take advantage of the parallelism of OpenCl. The more complicated the task the less likely it can be made to run efficiently on modern systems.

Edited by drew - Jan. 29, 2021 22:30:05

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Technical Discussion » How to create geometry in standalone hython script?


drew: 121 posts; Offline

Aug. 18, 2020 19:12:07

Something like this maybe.

import hou
import sys

def main(output_hip):
    geo_node = hou.node('/obj').createNode('geo')
    pysop = geo_node.createNode('python')
    code = \
'''
node = hou.pwd()
geo = node.geometry()
geo.createNURBSSurface(10,10)
'''
    pysop.parm('python').set(code)
    hou.hipFile.save(file_name=output_hip)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) == 2:
        main(output_hip=sys.argv[1])

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PDG/TOPs » How to debug a pdg scheduler type?


drew: 121 posts; Offline

Aug. 11, 2020 20:26:41

Many thanks, that makes things a lot easier!

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PDG/TOPs » How to debug a pdg scheduler type?


drew: 121 posts; Offline

Aug. 11, 2020 19:41:18

How does one go about developing a new scheduler type? At the moment if there is a problem with the python code the only feedback seems to be this error.

Load warnings for /home/drw900/HoudiniProjects/pbs/pbs_scheduler.hip
Warning: Bad node type found: pdg_drw900_pbsscheduler in /tasks/topnet1.

Is there some way to see the python interpreter stdout/err, stack trace etc?

Cheers,
Drew

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Technical Discussion » Rendering very large volumes / mantra / OpenVDB ?


drew: 121 posts; Offline

June 15, 2020 21:31:04

I have some quite large volumes (~40-120GB uncompressed) that I'd like to render and would appreciate any pointers to the current state of the art?

Before I go to the work of getting the data into OpenVDB format, I'm trying to find out if mantra (or any other production renderer) utilise out of core delayed loading of subsets of an OpenVDB volume? I note that the openvdb::File class supports delayed loading of volume chunks, but I don't know if this functionality is enabled and accessible from houdini/mantra.

Thanks.

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PDG/TOPs » TOP Deadline updates in Houdini 18.0.399 (new MQ)


drew: 121 posts; Offline

March 10, 2020 22:12:54

A bit of extra info to the last post. Strace'ing indicates that a thread is being woken up, very often. Maybe that is the cause of the idle cpu load?

nanosleep({tv_sec=0, tv_nsec=100}, NULL) = 0

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PDG/TOPs » TOP Deadline updates in Houdini 18.0.399 (new MQ)


drew: 121 posts; Offline

March 8, 2020 19:36:00

Looking forward to trying this new MQ with HQueue, coming soon?

BTW I just got it (linux 18.0.401) up and running and I notice it sits at about 8-9% CPU while idle which seems excessive?

> mqserver -p 4999 -s -i 0.0.0.0

Edited by drew - March 10, 2020 01:51:41

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