Hi,

I have a problem with Houdini freezing. I am running the free apprentice version (9.5.170).

I mostly used Houdini to try out the dynamics, fluids and particles. I cannot exactly determine what is trigerring the freeze. The freezing occurs randomly, it could be when I am setting up a scene or even during simulation

Freezing also tends to occur when I switch windows (for instance, pausing Houdini and looking at this website and coming back to Houdini to find it unresponsive).

One thing I like to clarify about my definition of freezing, when I checked Windows Task Manager, it shows that the program is still running. There is no ‘program is not responding’ alert. Regardless, the program refuses to ‘unfreeze’ even when Windows recognizes it as ‘running’

I tried leaving it alone to resolve itself, but even after severals hours it still remains in its freeze state. The CPU(s) are not 100% utilised

It have not done any heavy stuff yet(just learning the tutorials off this website and some stuff from 3DBuzz….) so I don't think it is a system resource issue.

Maya 2008 and my other compositing programs runs stable on my system if a point of comparison is needed.

I'd like to mention that the first thing I do when I launch Houdini is to close the Help browser which does not solve anything

I am using Nvidia 8800GT with the latest forceware drivers. I am running a Q6600 with 2GB RAM on WinXP 32bit.

Any advice appreciated. This freezing issue is preventing me from learning Houdini

Hi,

First of all, welcome to the forums!

With regards to your issue, there are some users who reported the latest drivers are not necessary the best for Houdini. Please search through the forums for Nvidia driver versions that works better with Houdini. In addition, please set the Antialiasing and other features to “Application controlled” as Houdini doesn't use most of them.

You can also download the latest build through the Support > Download link above. Please scroll down to the Daily Builds section for the latest build.

As for the Help Browser, you can turn it off by going to the Edit menu & uncheck Open Help Browser at Startup.

I have a P4 machine at home with a Quadro FX 1000 card. The driver version I'm using is really old & Houdini 9.5 runs fine.

Good luck!

Cheers!
steven

Hey ,
Dont worry your not the only person getting freeze ups ! and memory allocation errors.

Freeze ups :- I have been running winxp 32 sp3 at home with 4gigs of ram. I get freeze ups whenever I try to use the built in help. Yes its a right old mess and its being fixed.

I also have got freeze ups and memory allocation errors when doing anything in fluids more complex than a ball hitting a grid even when writing out sims. I tested the same thing in work on a 64bit linux system with 6gigs of ram. That worked well.

It really boils down to ditching the 32 bit system and either going vista64 or Linux64 or using a mac OS. Just using 2gigs of ram is just not enough for fluids.

Thanks for the replies guys

I am trying the latest ‘Daily’ build now

What I can see now it Houdini is possibly not workable (asn in not reliable) on 32bit OS Win systems? This is the feeling I am getting after looking through the threads here

Hi

Houdini works very nice, your problems seems to b e related to your graphics card, NOT houdini.

Those nvidia consumer cards are not that great for 3D appz that suck all that they can, but there is a nice solution.

get the omega drivers

http://www.omegadrivers.net/omega_drivers.php [omegadrivers.net]

those drivers are tweaked for performance on lowEnd cards, I had a very very old card at home with those drivers and it worked great, give them a try.

just realize this drivers ARE NOT SUPPORTED by nvidia and you use them under your own responsibility.

good luck

circusmonkey
I get freeze ups whenever I try to use the built in help. Yes its a right old mess and its being fixed.

Hey circusmonkey, could you try 9.5.205 or later to see if it's better? There was a threading issue fixed that might help.

Hi Edward ,
I have just tried the new build and Houdini .206 is still suffering from a memory allocation error. When writing out a sim on a 32 bit system with 4gigs of ram running xp sp3.


regards Rob

With .206 I can only get a fluid sim to play up to about 1gb of ram usage before it crashes. That's about 30 frames of fire sim set to 80^3. It seems a little better but still seems quite severely limited. (Vista 32-bit)

circusmonkey
I have just tried the new build and Houdini .206 is still suffering from a memory allocation error. When writing out a sim on a 32 bit system with 4gigs of ram running xp sp3.

But that's a totally different issue than the one you talked before. Note the bolded text …

circusmonkey
I get freeze ups whenever I try to use the built in help. Yes its a right old mess and its being fixed.

no errors yet edward with the help , open / closed about 15 times with a few searches thrown in for good measure



R

Just a quick update, I have installed 9.5.204 (208 last night) last weekend and have gone midway through the Digital Tutors Introduction to Houdini Dynamics without any hiccups or freezing.

I did not do any changes to my Nvidia drivers(the earlier version of the Nvidia drivers were giving problems to my other video encoder).

Will upgrading to 4GB ram in WinXP 32bit help at all? (especially when I start on fluids) Whenever I am playing with particles, according to my task manager it seems I always have 1GB ram available

Will upgrading to 4GB ram in WinXP 32bit help at all? (especially when I start on fluids) Whenever I am playing with particles, according to my task manager it seems I always have 1GB ram available

As mentioned earlier in this thread of course increasing your ram from 2 to 4 gigs is going to help. But also mentioned is when doing fluids and other intensive operations 64bit is preferred coupled with more ram

Rob

mysticaldodo
Will upgrading to 4GB ram in WinXP 32bit help at all? (especially when I start on fluids) Whenever I am playing with particles, according to my task manager it seems I always have 1GB ram available

Probably not, unless you also move to WinXP x64, or Vista 64-bit at the same time. It also depends on how much memory you have currently (like if you only have 1 GB of RAM, then yes it will probably help . Finally, note that while theoretically possible, in practice one can only use up to 3 GB of ram on 32-bit Windows.

Thanks for the answer guys

Perhaps I should have rephrase the question, is it a big or small improvement?

Ps. I tried to run the shatter simulation from http://hassanvfx.blogspot.com/ [hassanvfx.blogspot.com] and got a memory allocation error

Sidetrack for a while:
I am pretty much ignorant on 64bit. But I am guessing migration will be a headache. From what I understand, only certain types of software like Antivirus needs to be the 64bit version. I am aware of 64bit hardware drivers, but some stuff like the mobo are kind off plug and play installed (I am sure I didn't installed any drivers for that, other then the ethernet and built in soundcard, this is on WinXP). Would I run into problems with these?

As for the rest, you can use back the regular 32bit software (e.g. Itunes, games)?

If I move on to Win XP 64 (not sure if i can find this here) or Win Vista 64 (which is available in abundance here), will it automatically take advantage of all the extra memory or do I have to do tinkering here and there? Of course by then, I will have 4GBram.

Thanks again, guys

As I said, it probably won't help. How much RAM do you have right now?

As for going to 64-bit Windows, it will be a headache for sure. Expect driver problems. Running 32-bit software is not a problem at all. And yes, 64-bit Windows will automatically take advantage of the extra memory provided you install the 64-bit version of Houdini and not the 32-bit version.

As per my first post, I have only 2GB ram

I am researching the pro and cons of Vista versus XP now

You might also want to consider Linux as well, something like Ubuntu. Just have a separate partition for it. I believe Ubuntu also has a 64-bit Live CD so can test it out first to see if it works on your hardware.

I run Vista-64 and everything is fine for me. Adding more than 3gb of ram to XP-32 has been known to cause serious problems with stability even though they claim it can run ok with 4gb.
32-bit games ect run fine for me, they just get installed into a seperate set of program files, as in 64-bit you get 2 set of program files…

Program files <—for 64-bit apps
Program files(x86) <—for 32-bit apps

As for Houdini the 64-bit version has and still is very stable for me. Only crashes Ive had has been completely my fault.

ragupasta
I run Vista-64 and everything is fine for me. Adding more than 3gb of ram to XP-32 has been known to cause serious problems with stability even though they claim it can run ok with 4gb.

I run XP 32 on a 4GB RAM machine with no problems. You can put as much RAM as you want and still you won't have problems, XP32 simply won't use that RAM.
Stability problems will show when you enable a special startup option which allows XP32 to use 3GB of RAM instead of 2GB.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx [microsoft.com]

Dragos

hmm i bought houdini ap hd yesterday and it worked fine, now today when i open it up everytime i create a primitive it freezes up. i have vista ultimate 64bit and 4 gigs of ram , ati radeon 3850 and i just installed the latest drivers it seems like after i open houdini i have to wait a couple min before creating new objects or it will freeze