Hi all,

I wonder is anyone else is having the problem I am experiencing:

I have a simple crowd sim:
1. I have one agent defined from a FBX. The agent is generated in a different hip file and baked out. In my simulation scene, I am accessing the agent from ‘disk’
2. I plug this agent into the crowd source node.
3. I simulate my crowd source, using the shelf tool. All good so far.
4. I have some geometry (waving flag) saved out as a bgeo sequence, which is brought into my crowd system as packed primitive sequence. It is then attached to my simulated agent with the Agent Relationship node.
5. I save the scene.
6. When I press play or try to cache out my geometry, I get ‘segmentation fault’, Houdini bombs out and I can not load my scene any more. Not only that, I cannot load the backup scene or even any other scenes I have ‘saved_as’ along the way. As soon as I try to load a hip file, I get a segmentation fault again and Houdini bombs out. Weird.

I have remade my agent (with new name) from scratch and remade my simulation scene multiple times and this crash keeps happening.

Has anyone seen this kind of problem? What can I do to recover my hip scenes

This happens to me sometimes because my system simply does not have enough memory.

What I normally do in such a case is open the hip file then immediately start spamming ESC - which cancels the cook.

I then switch the cook setting to Manual and save the file. ( In such a case saved like that I can open the hip file without it starting to cook and crash ).

I then make a copy of that file and work with that by going in and scaling back elements of my scene where I think it would reduce memory usage such that I can use it with my current system without it crashing.

BabaJ
I then switch the cook setting to Manual and save the file.

Thanks, BabaJ.

How can I switch the cook setting to ‘Manual’?
I'm in 16.5

Many thanks,

D.S

you can switch the cook settings to Manual using the selector in the far right/bottom of the UI
you can also open a hip file via the command line tools and use the -n option

Wonderful, thanks so much!

Just a warning, maybe somebody will have a similar issue: in my case showing Material Stylesheets in viewport, which is on by default, crashes Houdini as well. You open a scene and it immediately crashes. It was tricky to figure out because it didn't crash when I added the stuff - only after reopening. Maybe it started after attaching textures, it was ok at the beginning, with simple colors and stuff. The solution (workaround really) is to open Houdini first, disable material display and, for safety, change to wireframe mode and then open the scene.
This, however, is happening in H16 Indie. Haven't checked H16.5 yet (I'm in a middle of a project).