Hi,

New too Houdini but have been trying the free edition to learn. Finally decided to purchase the indie edition and here began my issues.

My first issue was getting the licensing too work which I finally got working after some searching and entering the details manually.

But now is my second issue and the one I'm stuck on.

So the free edition had been working fine but now if I boot the software and work things are fine but in a small windowed screen. I can create and manipulate to my hearts content but the second I click expand to full screen or even click on the edge of the window to make it slightly bigger Houdini crashes. This didn't happen on the free edition and the software has been uninstalled and reinstalled whilst trying to sort my first issue. I'm running windows 10 64 with nvidea on current driver and Houdini is the current stable edition as I have just downloaded it from the site. Any help would be great as I have gone from free and working to paid and not working.

Thanks

The program itself is identical between Apprentice, Indie, Commercial, and FX; the only difference is with limitations applied based on the license, so that probably wouldn't play a role in whether it crashes or not.

It definitely sounds like a graphics driver related issue. Quite a few people have found that the latest big Windows 10 update, (much like the disastrous update in December-February), either updated the graphics driver and started causing problems from that or updated something else that caused the graphics driver to become unstable. This latest update also broke (in certain cases) compatibility with the memory allocator we use, so that could also be a factor.

1) What graphics card do you have? (e.g. my home laptop has an Nvidia GeForce 940M)
2) What graphics driver version do you have? (e.g. my home laptop has 382.05, a.k.a. 22.21.13.8205)
3) Does it prevent the crash if you set the environment variable TBBMALLOC_PROXY_ENABLE to 0 and then start Houdini? (If it doesn't, unset the variable, else you'll have slowdowns in a bunch of cases once the crash is addressed.)

I had to manually download from the Nvidia website and install 382.05 after the Windows 10 update in December-February, since at the time it wasn't yet available via Windows Update or even Nvidia's updating program, and I've been a bit nervous about updating it since then. If you go to the Nvidia website, there might be a newer driver than the one you have, though it may or may not be any more stable, if that's the cause of the crash.

I was running an older Nvidia driver but I updated too 382.53 when I couldn't expand the screen.

I'm running a gtx980Ti i7-6700 4Ghz and 32gb ram. Most drives are ssd and I'm using win 10 Pro V1703 fully updated.

Adding TBBMALLOC_PROXY_ENABLE 0 seems to have solved my problem.

Thanks for the help

Now I just need to master this beast having used 3ds max since before it was max I'm a bit stuck in my ways but I already see the benefits from Houdini.

demonseedgfx
Adding TBBMALLOC_PROXY_ENABLE 0 seems to have solved my problem.

Oh dear. Can you file a bug report [www.sidefx.com] about this? If that prevents the crash, it's probably the issue with the memory allocator being broken by the recent Windows 10 update.

Note that some things in Houdini will be quite slow with that environment variable set that way. We'll see what we can do so that hopefully you can remove it once the issue is fixed.

Hi,

So I am getting random crashing now. The environment change you asked me to do opens Houdini in full screen. I do sometimes get a crash here on opening the app (about one in five) I do always get a crash if I hit the reduce window and sometimes on the minimise window. Sometimes on opening a demo scene, sometimes on closing a tab or creating a new tab. I will send in a debug report in.

I have now completely removed Houdini. Full registry clean. Full removal of all Houdini folders and files distributed on the workstation. Rebooted and then done the same again and rebooted. Fresh install and still seem to be getting the crashing. Trying to follow tutorials and adding a network node is crashing it. I do not understand how going from a free version to a paid version can do this. Short of a complete OS wipe which I dont want to do as all my other software is working fine I dont know what to do.

Okay. Since it's still crashing with tbbmalloc disabled, it's probably the graphics driver/card/system combination, then, (unless it's something like failing memory or disk, but that's less likely). Reinstalling Houdini and rebooting won't have any effect, because it'll still hit the same graphics issue.

All I can suggest as an immediate thing to try is to test different graphics driver versions until you find one that doesn't crash. 382.05 seems to work for me on a GeForce card on Windows 10 with Houdini 16.0.657, but it's a mobile card (940M), so it might or might not be different for your card.

Hi,

Having gone through a few things with the debug they have requested that I use the QT version. I am now running 16.0.633QT on Nvidia 382.53 which is the latest at this moment.

Things are now stable and working well again.

I must commend the customer support. The response times and help have been better than I have experienced with any other company.

Now I just need to get my head fully around this beast.

Thanks for your help.