Hey All,

Now this is happening in Houdini Master 6.1.208. Again if I had to guess its my wonderful ATI X1 256 Pro lovely drivers. I have the very newest drivers too so … Yeah.



Does anyone know how to fix this??? Has anyone ever even seen anything like this??? lol I don't know what to do. I am about to go crazy over the endless problems I am having with my X1 256 Pro. It does something wrong and bad in every CG App I have.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

i've had this problem in Maya…. i was zoomed way too close.. i.e. my objects weren't big enough. only thing i would think to check is the FOV being some crazy value?

Hey all,

Oh I found a way around it I just have to work through Cam1 all the time. I don't know what happened to the default cam/no cam or how to change the parameters for no cam.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

P.S. Its something crazy like this every two minutes or so. Its a nightmare.

Hey all,

Oh it gets better. When I tried to leave the cam1 mode to no cam the computer locked up. I restarted and tried again and this time it fixed the problem as seen in the pic above for the no cam. :evil: :twisted:

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

Methinks you should get another card. Nothing's worth that.

I'm completely unfamiliar with the ATI line - but isn't this a fairly decent and recent card? I heard they got their drivers in order lately - but I'd be appalled if this is an example of it…

Cheers,

J.C.

Hey JC,

Yeah the only newer card from the ATI series is the X2 otherwise this is the 2nd from the best one they offer. I don't have the money to get another card. If I did I would get an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1000. I have never had a problem with NVIDIA's drivers. ATI is still working on getting a unified driver and in my opinion they are very far from getting their drivers together and in order. Its probably been out about 9 months I think. I would think they would have their drivers together after 9 months of the card release, but I am thinking they never will. I am going to write them a long letter come thrusday or friday. I am still trying to do my final project so I can not take the time out to write them now.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

Oh and if you think this looks bad you have to see it on linux. The windows driver problems are like a walk in the park compared. A Voodoo 1 would out perform this card on the linux because of the driver problems. I get logged out every so many minutes. Crashes Linux which is a pretty impressive thing to do. Not to mention the surfaces breakup as you zoom in and out. For some reason they are unable to fully shade a face of geometry. I could go on and on but I have a life, I think.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

What you've described is precisely what I've heard ATI drivers were always like(in other words, specs meant absolutely nothing because the slightest problem either caused a major performance hit or crashed), but I was told again and again that they're become much better. I'm baffled. Not knowing the line of products makes it harder to make a fair call - perhaps because of the lack of unified drivers you mentioned it's another line of cards that got done properly and this one was left in the dust?

That sucks.

Cheers,

J.C.

I have a FireGL X1-128 and have no such problems. It just looks like a wildly zoomed viewport you have there. I also have their November drivers.

hmmm.

Hey,

Well when I did zoom out the view port distorted the otherway. Meaning the legs were then huge and the upper body was very small. Same thing if I rotated it the arm would be huge and the rest of the body very small. It was impossible to work with.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

P.S. You have the card below me and you are a very lucky man. Ugh!!!

Hey,

Now I just got another corrupted file in Houdini.6.1.208. It was working fine last night well … fine as can be expected the problems I have been having but now I have yet another file that won't build all the way because it appears was not complete during a save or something. Frustrated. I have done this rig several times now.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

This is unrelated to the vid card, and I'm unsure why you're having trouble with it when Jason isn't. What you describe seems like a fundamental misrepresentation of the GL code - and Jason's obviously not having that. The saving thing - are you stomping over top of the same file every time you save? It's bad practice, unless you're using the default save option - which is saving the previous versions in a “backup” directory - you should look for them there.

For the record, I can count the number of times I've created a bad hip by saving on one hand, and that's over many years. It sounds like you're having other troubles. Are you running both Linux and Windows on one dual boot machine? If so - have you run memtest on it? You might have bad ram - that would certainly explain a lot of your troubles…

Cheers,

J.C.

Hey JC,

Im not actaully dual booting I am using removable disks and I pop out one hard drive that has an OS on it and then pop in another one. I think have a second removal hard drive that I leave in and I back up to that one. I have about 5 removable hard drives in total for OSes and Backups. I have not run Linux in about a month. Where can I get this program you mention. I have never heard of it. I am not crazy enough to try to dual boot from the same hard drive or what not because that causes alot of problems. I went to the seperate disk system for several reasons one of which was it reduced problems between windows and Linux. Still I could vary well have interduced such a memory problem. Thanks for the tip about the backup folder. Normally just use the Save feature but I might have tried using the Save As and saved over it. I will make sure I do not do that anymore. You may have saved me a tremdenious amount of headaches.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

P.S. Thank JC Thank you alot. I need that right now. lol

Hey,

oh the X1-256 and the X1-128 are not the same cards. There is more of a difference than just ram. They also have different drivers and hardware specs. The X1-256 Pro has AGP 8X and AGP Pro 50. My motherboard is an Asus and it has an AGP 8X and AGP Pro 50 capabilites. The X1-128 does not have the AGP Pro 50 and neither does the X2. Its just an FYI.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

Hey JC,

Thank God for that backup folder I did not know about that. Thank you so much JC yeah that saved me from alot more work. Wow. Thats all I can say right now.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

http://www.memtest86.com/ [memtest86.com]

Just to be clear, I wasn't particularly suggesting the *video card* had bad mem(although that's possible), I was thinking about your main memory. Anytime people start talking about crashing all the time, lockups, bizarre inexplainable display issues in something as relatively stable as win2000/XP, it tends to be either a screwed up installation or bad mem. Bad mem is usually manifested by completely bizarre, sporadic behaviour that is constantly changing. Memtest will at least eliminate that possibility.

You can change the Save behaviour in Prefs. As the SESI crew can attest , I made loud and long complaints about the choice they made for the default - this saving to the backup folder. Their argument was that they were getting more and more users that wanted to work on “Chair.hip” and didn't want to manage versions. I think that's charming and cute and all, but nothing to do with a serious production environment. I lost.

Anyway, much, much easier than “Save As” is to change Prefs/Misc/Auto Save Method to “Make Numbered Backups”. This doesn't hide any files from you, as the default does, and every time you hit Save, it increments the number of your file “foo1.hip, foo2.hip,” etc. You have your complete history right there.

Cheers

J.C.

Hey Nate,

Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier on this, but you look like to be having a focal length problem.

What I have noticed is that if you go to you cam1 params->view tab->Focal Length and change it to a really low number (50 is default, 10 or lower will give you the wide angle effect that is occuring.), it will cause your default cam to work at this focal length as well if your cam1 isn't set to ‘lock camera to view’.

What I did to test it out was the following:

Started from default houdini load, made a quick model (in this case a sphere copied to a grid).

Went to OBJ level. default cam is fine. Go to cam1 params and change focal length to 5.

Switch from default cam to cam1 (now with focal length of 5) and zoom out.

Zooming out causes it to switch back to the default cam because cam1 was not set to ‘lock camera to view’.

Now the default cam has adopted the focal length of 5. (odd that it occurs, but still occurs). And there is your distortion.

So to get it back to normal. Go back to cam1 params and change focal length back to 50.

Switch to cam1 and zoom out (which automatically switches back to default cam).

Now the default cam has adopted the 50 focal length and everything is fixed.

I hope that solves your problem. It sounds like you are experiencing some other difficulties that I cannot really help with and maybe even the focal length issue is beyond what I explained and connected to the other problems.

Here is the sphere copied to grid with the focal length of 5 wide angle distortion:



good luck with everything,

Dave

Hey Deecue,

Yeah see your doing that focal length on a camera such as cam1. If you notice on the picture that focal length distrotion is happening with no cam. You can't set the parameters for a no camera as far as I know. I did fix the problem I switched to cam1 which fixed the viewport and then when I switched back to no cam the computer crashed. Then I brought the computer up. It was distorted again. So I switched to cam1 fixed it then switched back to no cam and the focal length distortion was magically gone just as it appeared on no cam. So thats the fix. I have not had to happen since. I just installed my Motherboards nforce drivers which the rep from ATI said would cause a bunch of crashing without the driver installed with their latest driver. On previous install of my windows I had the driver installed but it crashed. So I am going to test to see if this works. It still does not explain the whole Linux problem with the card barely being able to move around a vew port with nothing more than that skeleton bone rig in it. Linux also crashes and logs me out. So … this might take awhile to get ironed out.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

P.S. I love your baby icon on ODForce.net

Hi Nate,

Try moving your CDocuments and Settings/<USERNAME>/Local Settings/Temp/houdini6.1 folder to somewhere else and then launch Houdini. See if that fixed your problem. It could have been just a corrupted preference file. If you're on LINUX, it's located under ~/houdini6.1

Hope that helped.
Alex

Actually, that screen shot was from no camera. Unfortunately i cropped the bottom part of the image, so you cant see it. But if you notice at the top-right, it says persp, not persp:cam1. So it is the default ‘no camera’. That is what i was trying to say in my explanation of what I did. It seems as if the ‘no camera’ automatically adopted cam1's focal length. I just added that elliptical section to show you what cam1's settings were when I zoomed out and switched to ‘no camera’. But yea, that screen shot is the defaul camera.

Thanks, i love that baby too.