I am working on the Pinboard tutorial (the one found on Techimage that shows how they did the cool effect in XMen)..

In the beginning of stage 5 I do as the tutorial suggests and do a test render by right clicking on the render icon and chosing Mantra. Up pops the mplay window. When I close the mplay window however and try to go back to Houdini I find that its hanging. Looking in the taskmanager in Windows you can see mplay creeping up in memory bit by bit, bloating. I can't kill Houdini until I kill mplay.

This gets pretty tedious obviously. I'm running a Compaq Evo 800W with a Radeon 9000 w/64MB and Houdini Apprentece edition.

I've tried turning off all of the hardware options for mplay, and messing with all its options, but to no avail.

Any environment variables I should have set or workarounds for this?

Is there an alternate to mplay that I can use with Houdini on Windows XP?

AFAIK there isn't any memory leak in mplay - and the behaviour you're getting isn't at all kosher. Something's funny! How do you close mplay - actually quitting it, or stowing it? Also, Houdini should be available immediately after mplay comes up - it shouldn't be hanging at all. Do you get the same behaviour with a simple file with nothing but a sphere? If not, then somethings happening with mantra and the thing you're trying to render. It's hard to say without more specifics like hardware, memory, etc.
How's your memory? As *my* memory serves , isn't that pinboard thing fairly memory-intensive?

As far as alternatives, I doubt it. You'd be giving up a lot of functionality anyway trying to use another viewer. There's always straight to disk, but my guess is it's not mplay's fault at all.

Cheers,

J.C.

What's happening exactly is that after mplay pops up the test render for step 5 of the pinboard demo, I can minimize it or hide it and go back to houdini fine.

But, when I exit mplay, either by hitting the Windows close titlebar icon or by selecting Exit in the mplay menu, and then go back to houdini, that's where things get weird. At first I can tumble around, but as soon as I try to do anything else, it hanges, and you can see that mplay never actually quit, the process is still running in the taskmanager viewer.

While the end steps of the pinboard tut are intensive for memory, step 5 is not, when this happens houdini only has 56MB in use.

Tell you what, can you try to repro it by doing a test render of the step 5 file in version 6 of Houdini? I posted this file over at odforce, since this forum doesnt let you post files:

http://odforce.net/forum/index.php?s=3b7c32fe7e7c157691726d48286f9ade&act=Attach&type=post&id=6750 [odforce.net]

That's a direct link to the zip file..

Yah, it works fine for me, but then I'm on Linux, 1 gig memory. Actually, memory usage isn't all that high, anyway. It sounds like an XP-specific problem, possibly with graphics drivers…

Sorry I can't be more useful…

Cheers,

J.C.

Ok, well I found a work around, never try to exit mplay from mplay, if you kill it in the taskbar Houdini is not affected by it. I believe it has something to do with the way mplay exits itself, something it might do to Houdini in that process..

Anyway, I can live with that for now..

Hello all…

I've been getting wierd issues with mplay too recently. This morning (its happened before) I had rendered 6 frames into the same mplay window. When I looked mplay was taking up 1.1Gb of RAM.
Personally I don't know how much RAM a 720x390 image takes up, but I'm pretty sure its not that much.

Cheers
Marc

It doesn't.

You on windows? XP? I'm wondering if this is an XP issue? Hmmm…

Runs great on Linux, anyway…

Cheers,

J.C.

oh yeah, forgot to mention. This is on KDE (RH).

Its quite wierd actually. Since my post I was rendering a simple scene and I had 60-something frames in there and it was only taking 700Mb. Its still a lot, but nowhere near as much as it was doing before.

Still think theres a leak though

Marc

In windows 2000 pro after I stop a render with the process set above normal or on high mplay will hang and keep going and continue to eat processing power and memory. I have 1.5 Gig of ram so … yeah. By stop I mean selecting the kill render in Houdini or by end task in the task manger either way it does the same thing. Sometimes and not always. I can kill mplay in the task manager and that fixes the problem. It works!

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

I've found in Windows 2000 using the Interactive version of Mplay is extremely dodgy. I have very few problems using normal Mplay (md instead of ip). Also make sure you dissconnect before you shut Mplay down.
If you have been doing a few renders over time and Houdini hangs check task manager and see if imdisplay is running (Open GL renders). If it is and your render has finished shut imdisplay down with the end process command and Houdini should start up again. Sometimes there will be multiple imdisplays or mantras in task manager so it always pays to check regularly to see stuff is shutting down properly. This has solved most of our problems with Mplay, so hopefully it will help you out.

I did the pinboard tut with XP on an Athlon (with a meagre 256MB) using Houdini 5.5 nc
(its a really good tut, yeah? though maybe gets a bit long winded towards the end)

didn't have any problems with mplay though the tut took a while
and Houdini quit a few times for no good reason

I've found a nice stable driver for my GF4 (not sure which it is, am at work) and just gone to Houdini 6 nc
since then the system is really solid and I have no redraw problems or slowdowns
(apart from when rendering image3d volumetircs)

markc