Greetings all,

I am just starting to look at Houdini Apprentice but have some questions about the hardware it requires and licensing.

I am using:

Dell xps2010
Vista32 Ultimate
Intle core 2 2.33Mhz 4Gb ram
ATI mobility Radeon X1800 with 256MB Video mem.

Am I liable to have problems with this setup and graphics card? I am coming from modo which will neither support Vista or a notebook graphics card and which crashes horribly on my system.

Additionally I live on a boat and have only intermittent access to the internet. How does licensing work? I gather I can run offline but must be on line to get my license renewed? How often must this be done?

Thanks in advance for you advice and opinions…

Ed Seling

Hi,

First of all, welcome to the forum!

Here's the System Requirements page [sidefx.com]. From the hardware you listed, you should be fine except for a bit of graphical issues with the ATI card due to the graphics drivers. There are other users who posted about the card so please search through the forum for more information.

As for licensing, please check the Apprentice FAQ found under the FAQ section [sidefx.com].

Please post back if you have more questions.

Cheers!
steven

Thanks for your reply. I have read but not understood the FAQs on licensing. A simpler explanation of how licensing works would be helpful. From my reading it sounds like Houdini needs an internet connection otherwise why would firewall settings be important? But then they say you can install a license without internet? It sounds like licenses need to be renewed but I can find no reference to how often?

And your references to ATI graphics problems is not encouraging…that is what drove me from Modo.

But thanks again for you time and attention.

Ed Seling

You need to update your Apprentice license once a month, unless you buy Apprentice HD.

Houdini itself doesn't need the Internet. You can manually update the license by collecting certain information about your computer (which Houdini provides you) and obtaining license keys from this information on a computer that is connected. It takes a few seconds. You then simply manually input the license keys into Houdini. Complete instructions are provided in one of those FAQs.

However, you need to download the software (and updates) over the Internet, and these are not small files.

Thanks, that answered my questions exactly

sailor_ed
Thanks for your reply. I have read but not understood the FAQs on licensing. A simpler explanation of how licensing works would be helpful. From my reading it sounds like Houdini needs an internet connection otherwise why would firewall settings be important? But then they say you can install a license without internet? It sounds like licenses need to be renewed but I can find no reference to how often?

And your references to ATI graphics problems is not encouraging…that is what drove me from Modo.

But thanks again for you time and attention.

Hi Ed,

Thanks to ColinCohen for providing the exact answer.

I don't mean to discourage you with regards to the ATI graphics problem. There are one or two versions of the graphics drivers which seems to be mostly okay. From what I've read, there are some glitches but it most likely won't crash your system.

There is an alternative which uses the CPU to drive the graphics but it will be slower. In any case, I strongly recommended you give Houdini a try if you can.

Cheers!
steven

Steven,

Will do! Thanks.