I was very excited to get my new Mac Pro for a variety of professional creative endeavors, but I've become an avid Houdini hobbyist and especially couldn't wait to see the difference from the sad, old, 4-core MacBook Pro I was replacing.

I have to say, it's been a mixed bag. While Houdini is obviously vastly more performant with multithreaded tasks (not so much with single), I'm experiencing WAAAAY more crashing than I used to. And I was already experiencing quite a lot of crashing! I don't have particularly complex setups as I am still learning, some basic FLIP work and playing around with Vellum. Basic modeling. Really nothing to write home about. But it doesn't matter what scene I'm working on, they all crash!

Here's my setup:
+ 2.7 GHz 24-Core Intel Xeon W
+ 384 GB 2933 MHz DDR4
+ AMD Radeon Pro W5700X 16 GB
+ 4GB SSD
+ macOS Catalina 10.15.5
+ Houdini 18.0.460
(Yes, this is my version of a mid-life crisis sports car.)

Any obvious red flags? I guess I assumed all of the crashing I had been experiencing on my laptop was due to the machine's age and poor specs. Imagine my unpleasant surprise!

Unfortunately, you've discovered, via an expensive purchase, why the majority of Houdini uses avoid MacOS. There at least one user who uses a Hackintosh with great success but for everyone else you're describing the MacOS+Houdini experience.

That’s interesting, so many of SideFX’s own tutorials are on Macs. Seems a bit misleading if the software isn’t up to par.

Absolutely! It happened with Mari and the last MacPro too many years ago. It boils down to Apple using an 10-year-old version of OpenGL and Houdini not being written for Apple's Metal graphics framework.

You can keep sending in bugs etc and listen to others who say Mac works, but if it doesn't work for you, best to switch to Windows or Linux or drop Houdini on MacOS.

I still enjoy using it, though if it was for professional work it’d be unthinkable. My main line of work is much more suited to Macs, this is more of a side personal art project. But glad to know it isn’t just me or my machine!

goat
Unfortunately, you've discovered, via an expensive purchase, why the majority of Houdini uses avoid MacOS. There at least one user who uses a Hackintosh with great success but for everyone else you're describing the MacOS+Houdini experience.

That would be me…but I also use Houdini on my el-cheapo Mac Book Air and it's solid as F—!

You can watch my presentation for the Los Angeles Houdini User Group (done on my older 8700k i7…I now run a 9900k i9) or any of my YouTube tutorials where I'm typically using Houdini while also recording my screen feed and running other apps in the background…I have yet to have a single crash while doing any of these videos.

Meanwhile, do a search for Houdini Windows 10 user crashes and you'll find plenty of posts on here, Discord, Facebook groups, OD Force….you name it!

If you're interested to see how well it runs on Linux, watch the excellent Timucin Ogzer series of tutorials. Timucin is a hard core Linux user but geebuz does his system crash like mad even when not doing much! I think a couple of Steven Knipping tutorials also feature some glorious Linux crashes.

I think in general Houdini is pretty crash-prone no matter the OS platform, and Houdini 18 has taken that to a whole new level. Good thing SideFX has implemented such a robust auto-save and crash-file recovery, otherwise they'd had a user rebellion on their hands a long time ago.

The main piece of advice I will offer to the OP is that in my experience, I can trace 90% of hard crashes on my Mac to incorrect file permissions. An app tries to write something somewhere (cache files, tmp files, etc) and the OS won't allow it – instant crash. I was able to resolve tons of crashes I was having with Redshift and Houdini by making sure that my permissions allowed for full read-write access in certain folders.

I would try to run Houdini on a virgin houdini.env/packages setup to minimize the risk that some 3rd party add-on might be creating weird issues.

Last but not least JoeNYC, if nothing else works, try re-installing…just Houdini at first, OS if everything else fails. You have a crazy fast machine by any standard, and you should be getting amazing results on it. I suspect the issues you're having have nothing to do with OSX and a lot to do with other things. Feel free to private message me if you want to discuss in more detail some of your crashes.

Last but not least, if you're a Mac Houdini user, you might want to check out my YouTube tutorial channel:

www.youtube.com/c/RightBrainedTutorials

Hi Joe,

have you send a crash report to SideFX' support team yet? They might be able to identify some issues.

Personally I don't have remarkable issues with macOS and Houdini, but I am not doing large simulations, either.

Exactly as was predicted, the suggestion to send in bugs or hear that it works. Amazingly a new Mac requires this predictable advice shows that it doesn’t work for 99% of people.

I use Houdini on a Mac Pro too and yeah it does take some time to get used to the crashing. For folks used to more mainstream software like Photoshop or FCP, Houdini's crash rate is pretty appalling. Usually you can sorta tell when Houdini is about to crash, like when the viewport isn't updating correctly, you know it's time to hit cmd-s. At that point closing the existing Scene View pane and creating a new one triggers the crash immediately. My impression is that Houdini's OpenGL codebase is old and crusty and riddled with bugs, and depending on your GPU driver, the bugs may or may not precipitate a crash. I still can't get NURBS surfaces to shade reliably without toggling normals on and off for example and the bug was reported years ago.

The worst kind of crashes imho are the ones that crash Houdini the moment you open your hip file. For those crashes I found that launching Houdini with the -n flag (which starts Houdini in manual cook mode) and forcing the entire node graph to recook usually resolves the issue.

Thanks so much for the detailed response!

This is really interesting, as I've sometimes suspected that the crashes were related to writing to disk:

Midphase
The main piece of advice I will offer to the OP is that in my experience, I can trace 90% of hard crashes on my Mac to incorrect file permissions. An app tries to write something somewhere (cache files, tmp files, etc) and the OS won't allow it – instant crash. I was able to resolve tons of crashes I was having with Redshift and Houdini by making sure that my permissions allowed for full read-write access in certain folders.

Also, I've totally watched your tutorials! The one about how to replace the middle mouse button when using a trackpad was a god send!

Konstantin Magnus
Hi Joe,

have you send a crash report to SideFX' support team yet? They might be able to identify some issues.

Personally I don't have remarkable issues with macOS and Houdini, but I am not doing large simulations, either.

Not yet. I thought I'd try to self-solve on here first. I'm shy about using SideFX support as I'm sure they have loads of professionals with real deadlines that need help. Meanwhile, I'm just toying around.

ziconic
For folks used to more mainstream software like Photoshop or FCP, Houdini's crash rate is pretty appalling.

That's is exactly the mental framework I'm coming from. I've been doing UX design for 20 years, so lots of pro creative programs under my belt from companies like Adobe.

ziconic
Usually you can sorta tell when Houdini is about to crash, like when the viewport isn't updating correctly, you know it's time to hit cmd-s.

LOL - I've developed that exact sixth sense!

Thanks for the additional background, it helps to understand what is going on.

I have lots of crashes on Mac Pro 2019, 16 core both with W5700x and previously with 580x cards. Support said that no current graphics card for the Mac Pro 2019 meets their qualifications, which I find odd. With frequent saves (and the nodal structure itself of Houdini), I rarely loose much work. I have full permissions for Houdini in Catalina, so that is not the issue for me. Surprisingly, the crashes are pretty random. Sometimes I have made a change in a complicated simulation but other times it is a simple modeling parameter. Support said they could not replicate it and it was not a graphics card or memory issue from the crash report I sent them. They questioned if I had a bad memory chip, but the diagnostics report no problem (as do third party RAM checking utilities).

I'm quite interested in why people use MacOs with Houdini when there are endless warning in the forums that you will encounter problems. Can anyone enlighten me?

For me, the advantages are other OSX programs, driver stability, easier to troubleshoot, and overall better stability and support and hardware that holds up better. If I were just working in Houdini, I would not pick a Mac. I use parallels for a few programs that are not available on OSX. I had a lot of nightmares with various windows builds at home and at work.

goat
I'm quite interested in why people use MacOs with Houdini when there are endless warning in the forums that you will encounter problems. Can anyone enlighten me?

You use what you use. I'm not going to change operating systems and upend all of my other workflows for one software package. Also, I don't think people typically read entire forums for warnings prior to trying software. I watched lots of Houdini tutorials, including by SideFX staff and many of those were on macOS, so I figured there must be support parity.

I have a gaming PC and tried Houdini on that prior to this purchase to see if it was significantly better, it wasn't. Maybe a tiny bit less crashing, but not by much; certainly not enough to warrant adopting Windows full time and all of the draconian hell that entails.

Fair enough. Sounds like there's no point for someone like me to give feedback for Mac users. Has no effect, doesn't change anything at all.

Cheers for the feedback!

Edit: Not that it counts anymore, but recently SideFx stopped using Macs for their demos as the performance is terrible but hey none of these posts makes any difference anyway.

goat
Sounds like there's no point for someone like me to give feedback for Mac users.

Yup…please stop.

joenyc
I watched lots of Houdini tutorials, including by SideFX staff and many of those were on macOS, so I figured there must be support parity.

There really is. When it comes to software parity between operating systems, Houdini is pretty damn good…as well as being an equal-opportunity crasher.

Most differences with other packages and render engines regarding feature parity involve the need for Nvidia and Optix which unfortunately is not available in OSX.

I'm still a bit unsure as to why you are experiencing frequent crashes, but I wouldn't be as confident as Goat to point the finger squarely in the direction of Cupertino. Even today I was working all day in Houdini 18.0.460 doing live IPR look dev on a shot with tons of geometry and VDBs and the only time I crashed was when I instanced a Stash node out of sequence in my node tree (i.e. my Stash node got inserted before a node that had the visibility enabled).

Considering how much time I've spent defending OSX as a viable operating system for CG work, you'd think Apple would have sent me a t-shirt or something by now. The truth is that if OSX wasn't working for me, I would have moved on. I can't tell you why my system runs so well vs. yours being so crash prone, but as I mentioned before I'm happy to help you troubleshoot further through PM's. But also, you should get SideFX support involved, this is what they do for a living so there is no reason not to contact them.

“There really is. When it comes to software parity between operating systems, Houdini is pretty damn good…as well as being an equal-opportunity crasher.”

Having not used mac I don't know why or how often it crashes. But on windows(and by no means am I windows fan), but I've been using HOudini on windows since about 15.5 and the only time houdini crashes for me on windows is when I run out of memory. If it has crashed for other reasons I can't remember, that's how infrequent it does for reasons other than insufficient memory. After a while too one gets to know when it will and when it won't. I've just recently got a new machine with win10 pro (again not a win fan) and with only Houdini installed on a large SSD, I was impressed with how when I started pushing going over my RAM limit on scenes it would switch over to using the drive to help out, saving even on RAM crashes. I still think though lots of work needs to be done on viewport stability in terms of just being less glitchy - although I've never had any crashes from viewport issues.(that I can remember).