Hey,
I'm running Houdini Apprentice on an 8 core 2.8ghz intel MacPro.
It has 8gb of ram, however when rendering out a frame preview I noticed on activity monitor that Houdini was only using about 500MB of ram and about 30GB of virtual, there was approximatly 6GB of “free RAM”, all processors were running at near max.

Just wondering if I need to tell Houdini how much ram it can use? or is this normal behaviour?

Thanks so much for your time!

Matt

Depending on what you're doing, you can adjust cache sizes to cache more data and avoid cooking, but generally Houdini's not going to use all your memory just because it's there - it just uses what it needs. You can adjust the various maximum cache sizes via the Cache Manager (Windows->Cache Manager). Note that for dynamics, you need to have a DOPnet node somewhere for a DOPs cache to appear in the list.

Hey that's a great help, Thanks!