Argh!

I just saw the updated specs for Houdini and notice that SideFx no longer supports the MacMini at all.

This may sound pathetic, but my 2.6Ghz i7 8 core MacMini with 16GB of ram running at 1600MHz is actually my fastest machine and worked quite well using R13.

I must say I am disappointed that the Houdini development team has simply given up. Especially when R13 worked fine on my MacMini.

I guess that lets the Dev team remove a bunch of bugs from the bug base. Time for margaritas boys!

Yeah, we know it is all Apples fault.
:cry:

It is time to pull out Flava Flav - "…don't believe, don't believe the hype!

The Mac Mini is hardly RIP. It should work fine as a render/simulation box, and, will work fine for H13 and all the other software that still uses OpenGL 2 tech.

I must say I am disappointed that the Houdini development team has simply given up.

This really should read:

'I must say I am disappointed that the Apple development team has simply given up.'

Right now it seems pretty pointless even making a OSX release for Houdini . Just yesterday I got the spinning wheel of doom just trying to move some UV's.


Rob

Enivob
I guess that lets the Dev team remove a bunch of bugs from the bug base. Time for margaritas boys!

I wish. The bugs are still there, and they are still getting attention when we can spare it. And we still have our fingers crossed that Apple will be able to address some of these bugs. But the “supported GPU” list is not the list of GPUs we want, hope, or ever will support. It's the list of GPUs that _actually work today_ (to the best of our knowledge). If and when Houdini can be run on other GPUs, we'll add them to the list.

Mark

So basically your at the mercy of Apple with your Product , why not just pull out of the market ?. Ive spoken to companies about Houdini but their pipelines are OSX based and often a mish mash of hardware. If they try Houdini and it gives them a bad experience , they wont touch your product again.

rob

It is not pointless for all of us that use OS X though.

circusmonkey
Right now it seems pretty pointless even making a OSX release for Houdini . Just yesterday I got the spinning wheel of doom just trying to move some UV's.


Rob

I am optimistic by nature and hope Apple get their act together with the graphics cards and drivers soon too.

Said that I would like everybody to understand that there are many different types of users and what for you may be heaven, others find hell.

I may be very comfortable with Linux but It does not what I need because I require a ton of extra tools around it and that only happens on Mac OS X, from After Effects, Audition, Photoshop, Sketchup, Keynote, FinalCutProX, Mind Manager, Merlin, etc…

Which leads me to my point, I rather use houdini on my laptop with all the glitches it has right now under OS X while having all these tools around it (specially if I am on a shoot) than going to Linux and having a myriad of holes in my workflow.

hope it makes sense
jb

mtucker

Enivob
I guess that lets the Dev team remove a bunch of bugs from the bug base. Time for margaritas boys!

I wish. The bugs are still there, and they are still getting attention when we can spare it. And we still have our fingers crossed that Apple will be able to address some of these bugs. But the “supported GPU” list is not the list of GPUs we want, hope, or ever will support. It's the list of GPUs that _actually work today_ (to the best of our knowledge). If and when Houdini can be run on other GPUs, we'll add them to the list.

Mark

circusmonkey
So basically your at the mercy of Apple with your Product , why not just pull out of the market ?. Ive spoken to companies about Houdini but their pipelines are OSX based and often a mish mash of hardware. If they try Houdini and it gives them a bad experience , they wont touch your product again.

rob

Not totally at the mercy of Apple. Most issues can, with enough effort, be worked around in some form. Unfortunately when an issue is found it's almost impossible to determine whether the workaround will be a simple tweak to a GLSL shader, or a complete rewrite of the feature. We just have to look at them as they pop up. Just last week we created workarounds for two major Intel issues, but we still aren't ready to call it “good enough” to go on the official list.

The update to the Mac GPU requirements page was an attempt to avoid the type of bad experience you mention. We'd rather be up front about what will and what won't work so users don't go in expecting one thing, and getting something very different. That's what makes someone decide they don't trust a company and refuse to come back. At least now a potential customer may look at our hardware list and say “that's not good enough”. But that person may come back in the future (when we have hopefully expanded that list a bit) and give us a try.

That's how I look at it anyway.

Mark

jordibares
I am optimistic by nature and hope Apple get their act together with the graphics cards and drivers soon too.

Another option, which sounds a bit crazy for 3d users, but Red users seem to do a lot; laptop users could use an external GPU for their laptop. As the GTX 980 on OsX seems to avoid most of the issues reported here, perhaps it could be an option for some.

In regards to bugs in Houdini: since switching from AMD to Nvidia, my bug reports have dropped precipitously!

I just pulled down 14.342 to see if any of the recent code changes might allow me to run MacMini Houdini on OS X 10.10.2 with an Intel HD4000 1GB. And it does…kind of.

The problems that cause the crash are video graphics call related. So I went through every Preference menu item and turned off all the check boxes that claimed to control extra screen drawing features. I also brought up the Display options dialog and did the same thing. I turned off all extra display options and saved as default.

After closing and re-opening Houdini 14.342 I was able to create nodes, dive inside, change parameters, render, light and essentially use Houdini without a crash. Simming seems to work ok too. But I did finally get a crash when I tried to select vertices in the Beach Tank. The viewport is basically at minimal settings and I see no textures at all, only white silhouette and wireframe.

If you are still experiencing OSX crashing when you dive into nodes try adjusting your Preferences or Display options to minimal settings (i.e. turn display features off). Then try again.

Update
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.
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I was able to re-enable textures and I am proceeding without crashes. I now can see textures in my viewport too.

Thanks for that , I will give it crack on my macbook

r

Same situation here. Hoping Apple will get its act together…

“Which leads me to my point, I rather use houdini on my laptop with all the glitches it has right now under OS X while having all these tools around it (specially if I am on a shoot) than going to Linux and having a myriad of holes in my workflow.”

I am sad to report that H15 has pushed the MacMini closer to the grave.:cry:

I have El Capitan installed and the first release of H15. What used to work in my viewport in H14 no longer works in H15. It is easy to confirm, if anyone is interested in doing so. Simply open H15 on a MacMini with Intel HD4000 (or 3000) and CTRL-Click on the MocapBiped1. This crashes H15. The New Simple Male and Simple Female rigs also crash H15.

Any feature that has to draw a font in the viewport seems to fail as well. If I turn on display numbers, crash. If I turn on XYZ coords, crash. And this should be a clue to developers that it can't all be Apple's fault. Something is going wrong in the Houdini code that is constructing the font/surface for the viewport.

Enabling a collision guide for the FLIP simulation is now out of the question. This causes H15 to crash.

The FLIP tank has a broken node when I enable OpenCL for the flip solver using H15. projectnonconvergent, inside BLUE solve box has a coding error.

If I choose Grain for Guide Visualization of particles the viewport update for the default flip tank drops to 14 frames per minute.

Particle display for the FLIP tank produces nothing in the viewport so your flip tank appears completely empty when you create it unless you have Point display turned on. The Sprite display does work and it probably the best option for a MacMini running H15.

The + icon for adding paths to the dialog boxes is broken. It either grabs on level up or one level down from the folder where you are when you click the button. Quite annoying.

Overall I can hear Jim Morrison singing in the background…

Intel cards aren't supported on OSX according to our sys req page, sorry.

https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2680&Itemid=390 [sidefx.com]

Thanks, yeah, I know. It's my only i7 machine, however, so I like the speed and the ram running @1600Mhz. Overall I can run Houdini blind' on the MacMini and rendering does work fine. As long as I leave Viewport Materials off I can work with silhouetted geometry in the viewport.

I do have a question on OdForum about the possibility of simply writing an OpenGL 2.1 shader and somehow using that instead of the default 3.1 that ships with Houdini. I still need to figure out how to set all that up. But that would be a per-geometry basis ‘fix’ it it can work at all..?

It's been answered over @ODF, but basically, no you can't do that on the Mac. On Windows and Linux, AMD and Nvidia provide the compatibility profile with their GL3-4 implementations, so you could code a GLSL 120 shader and it'd work. Apple chose the core profile route for their GL3.2+ implementation, which means that to use it, you give up any compatibility features - including GLSL 120 support.

I made a fix for Intel on Windows yesterday for today's cut (269), where the lit-shaded GLSL shader had too many texture samplers (the Intel compiler was not optimizing out the ones used by dead code). It might help.

I playing with H15 Apprentice, and i did the same test, just to see whats happen, and it's works, even w “no supported intel HD400”, it's quite surprising that H14 crash all the time, but H15 works fine until now…
Viewport now shade polygons without inverted normals, no more freeze screen and so on…
but, maybe, it's a lucky day, and i didn't test well..
but those crashs listed by Enivob, not happens on my mac mini w intel HD400 and 10.10.5

At least on Yosemite…
Anyone else?