Hello, I have been building quite a complex model for sometime now in Houdini 6.0. I am now at the stage of texturing but am having huge problems. After a certain point in my network the model just disappears from the viewport when I enable the display flag at that point.
I have tried removing all the Shader SOPS but still adding anything again causes the model to disappear. I am running a 1.8GHZ machine with 512MB RAM and 128GB Gefore Graphics card. I have tried the files on different systems and I have the same problem. Sometimes the model disappears at different points in the network, its very confusing.
Is my .hip file somehow corrupt? Does anyone think this is fixable? At a complete loss now , any help would be gratefully appreciated.
Hmm … Try this. Load it up on your system. At the last SOP where it still displays, lock it (click on the lock icon on the tile in the network editor). Save and reload your hip file. Now see if you can go further down.
Does it only disappear in the viewport, or is the actual geometry being lost? If you Middle-Click on the SOPs you can see geometry info. Is there any info on the SOPs with the vanished geometry?
Yes there is still gemoetry info for the SOPS where the model vanishes.
I have tried locking SOPS and then trying to continue, it seems to work for a bit then everything disappears again. Should I be locking every merge SOP I put down? What does locking in this way do?
This is really strange. At the point the model is disappearing, there is nothing in the viewport but I can still render out a frame with the camera I have set up?????? :?
The SOPS where it disappears are either Merge SOPS, shaders or UV Texture SOPS. If I set the display flag of one of these nodes and the model disappears going to the node above (where it displayed just a few seconds earlier) results in the model still not being displayed.
As for the settings of the SOPS, they are very simple just normal merges and shaders with a surface SHOP selected.
Hello deecue, I have sent the .hip file to your email address. If you could have a quick look that would be great.
I have now started a new .hip file and have copied over my networks piece by piece and removed all the shading and then added it again. This hasnt fixed it though, I am still getting the same problem.
Out of curiosity, go to the bottom on the SOP chain (where the geometry is missing) and add a SOP to remove all point/vertex attributes. With the Merge SOP, you can get unexpected behaviour when your inputs have different geometry attributes set (in particular, if one input has Normals and the other doesn't). Houdini has a hard time knowing how to initialise missing attributes and sometimes you get unexpected results.
Perhaps your display card is choking on these niggly problems?
…
As a side note to SESI; I think new Houdini users could be saved a lot of pain and confusion if infomative warnings were added to the Merge SOP when you merge disparate attributes. Like “Warning: Input 2 is missing point Normals. Initialising N to {0,0,0}. You may want to precede the Merge for input 2 with a Facet SOP to calculate normals.” or something.
Try check your clipping (geometry culling) values in the Display Panel > Culling(keyboard: D). You could decrease your near and increase your far clipping values.
Well I have it working now, which makes me very happy indeed!!. Seems it was a problem with the texturing. I had all my textures at the bottom of the main network and was using group numbers to assign them. I have now re-organised things and now locally texture parts of my network. I have also reduced the complexity of some of my more complex geometry and have got this to render and not display in the viewport(on purpose this time).
I would just like to say thanks to all you guys that gave me advice and helped me out. Its nice to know theres such a great community of people here that try hard to help others. Also thanks to deecue for testing my files on his system and for pointing me in the right direction.
I've had similar problems before. It looks like houdini is choking on models with a lot of geometry. The model I've had problems with was around 260K polys. It would disappear when trying to rotate in viewport. When I switch to wireframe then it would sometimes last longer before it disappears; in shaded mode it would always disappear. A partial fix as someone suggested is to cull your polys so you show only a subset of the model in display settings. Hopefully SESI will look into the opengl issues.
that would suprise me if it were that.. i've pushed models to almost a million poly's in houdini with never any “errors” or disappearing.. yea it would chug like hell and was far from realtime, but still worked.. this was on windows as well, with a far less superior system then yours. (and is also good to note that i really didn't make a 1 mil poly model, i was just curious to see what would happen)
, any help would be gratefully appreciated.
