I had previously corresponded with tech support over houdini crashes with directory search paths, and was told to make sure that in my preferences>general user interface>file choosers that I set it to “houdini Chooser Only”. That fixed a problem where opening Image Viewer or rendering to mplay would crash Houdini.

I have another issue that Houdini doesn't seem to be able to write to directories in OSX. I can right click a node and save geometry, but the other ways of writing geometry - rendering to geometry or a file node set to write, don't work. I noticed that the directory tree looks invalid (see attachment). Please help. Thanks.

does that directory exist on disk?

yes, to all programs other than Houdini (finder, word, photoshop, C4D, etc.)

Can someone please point me to how to edit some config file so that Houdini correctly recognizes OSX directory structures? It does behave better if I change the project directory to username/HoudiniProjects.

the issue is that $HIP will expand to the full path of the directory that the hip file is in.
so in the case of a hip file called foo.hip, saved as /Users/yourName/Documents/Houdini/foo.hip
the path: $HIP/Documents/Houdini
will be:
/Users/yourName/Documents/Houdini/Documents/Houdini

an easy way to know where $HIP is located is to open a Textport (Windows > Hscript Textport)
and type
echo $HIP

Maybe this is an OSX issue, since $HIP/Houdini/HoudiniProjects expands to users/username/Houdini/HoudiniProjects, not users/username/Documents/Houdini/HoudiniProjects. (two month old iMac 2017 with most recent OS). It would be nice to relocate $HIP to point to users/Username/Documents/Houdini. When I echo $HIP, I get users/username

$HIP is where Houdini was opened or where the current hip file lives - this will be different for every file…
if you have a file : /users/yourName/diretory/foo/bar/hello.hip
echo $HIP will return that.

have a read through this:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/basics/project [www.sidefx.com]

Thank you for the link. I had read this, but $HIP defaults to users\username if I don't start by opening a preexisting file. If I open I file from another location, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, Houdini is able to open the file but unable to find the actual directories that are easily opened in OSX finder (see first screen shot at the beginning of this thread) when it comes to writing a file. My previous discussions with tech support suggested that there is a bug in Houdini and I MUST use preferences>general user interface>file choosers that I set it to “houdini Chooser Only” to avoid crashes. When this is enabled, I get the error messages as above. It looks like I need to submit this as a bug report to SideFx.

The reason I wonder if it is an OSX issue (apart from my discussions with SideFx tech support about the preferences) is that the SideFx documents say that starting Houdini from the dock or Application menu in OSX may not load up all Houdini environment variables, unlike starting it in Windows. The document suggests starting Houdini via typing in the command line in OSX if loading the preferences is important.

I try to never open Houdini from any where other than the command line.
keep on support about it.

Discussing this with tech support, I think the issue does related to OSX opening Houdini from the dock or “applications”. As mentioned in the SideFx support documents, environmental variables may not be loaded when Houdini is launched from applications or the doc. I think it works differently in Windows.

I fixed some corrupted pref files, so it is possible that this was a factor as well. But more importantly, in Houdini 14 (but not apparently in 14.5) setting the preferences for “file chooser” to anything other than “Houdini chooser only” can crash mplay and image viewer. So when one comes to saving a file, Houdini defaults to its “Houdini chooser”.

Here is how things go wrong. If one has a directory “../users/username/documents/houdini/geo” and creates a new houdini document, it is easy to specify the file write directory to “$HIP/documents/houdini/geo”. $HIP will be ..users/username by default, and the file can be written. However, if one saves the houdini file to ../users/username/documents/houdini, $HIP will instantly be changed to ../users/username/documents/houdini and the file write node will then point to a non existant directory: ../users/username/documents/houdini/documents/houdini/geo.