I'm using the Apprentice version of Houdini (ver: 10.0.295) and I am attempting to follow allong with the 3dBuzz tutorial Fasttrack series. Recently Houdini has started to crash whenever I load my most recent saved file. It gives the following error:

A memory Allocation Error occured probably due to insufficent memory.

When I click ok it gives the following:
Fatal error: data saved to
C:\users\blahblahblah\blah.####.hip

(I used blah because it's just a long directory structure that is unimportant, and the #### just means a numbered file - the numbers are different every time)

when viewing the crash log this is what I see:

Crash report from Joe_Horacki; Houdini Master Version 10.0.295
Traceback from Sat Aug 22 15:53:33 2009
Caught signal 11
+0x04d29a88
+0x04d29e1b
+0x20696e69
+0x7473614d

What's worse is that regardless of what I do…that file is now corrupt and I have to go back two or more previous files to find one that loads and start all over! When I try loading the backup file it saves - it loads but most of my digital assets are missing or incomplete and a I get a load of errors.

I'm running a vista 32bit machine with 8 gigs or ram ( yes, I know vista 32 only uses 4 gigs) and a NVidia GeForce 9600 with 1 gig of ram.
As far as I am able to determine it's not the video card or driver as from reading the sticky because it can save a bakup hip file.

“If its your video card causing the crash then Houdini probably won't be able to save out a backup hip file. (This is one way to know if the crash is Houdini or Video Card related.) ”

The only problem I can see is that the .hip file seems to be extremely large 256 MB. Is this file corrupt and I'm just lucky it didn't crash before? Looking back and the file iterations it seems to double in size each time I saved a new version….I doubt that it normal…or is it?

I'm seriously getting annoyed (:x) and frustrated at having to go back one or two files and redo what I just did every few hours. If anybody can provide some insight or better yet a solution for this problem it would be much apparecaited!

I tried uploading the file, but it just takes forever (my guess it's too large.)

It sounds like you might be running into the problem in this thread:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=16124 [sidefx.com]

Various solutions are noted in the thread.

You can also go to Edit->Color Settings, Color Correction tab and delete the garbage in the LUT field, then Apply. In you download 10.0.314, it will correct the problem of the quote bloat, but you'll still need to manually delete the garbage in the LUT field.

The most straightforward way, if you don't have a complicated scene, is to start a new Houdini session with the latest build you downloaded and also open your current hip file. Now, you can copy & paste from your current file to the new session and save it. Done.

yup…that seems to be the problem!

Thanks for your help.