Hi guys,

We're working with alembics and standalone rendering a lot. Even more recently, with the new world building tools we're developing. A major problem is stabilty with Alembics in the viewport, Houdini crashes very often when the alembics change scale or other basic operations. Viewport representation messes up but that gets reset when changing a view and is not as much of a showstopper as the crashes.

Build is 18.5.596, there's V-Ray 4.3 in there too.

Anything we can do to make things better?

Thanks

Can you post a problem example Alembic?
My guess would be you may be overclocking your system too much.
Do you have stability problems with other apps?

No comparable stability problems with other apps or Houdini either, when not using Alembics. It's not a single one either, happens all the time.

OS is Windows. Feeling like GPU might be the problem, but driver update didn't solve it.

Alembics are copied to points, if that helps.

HristoVelev
Anything we can do to make things better?

Not really. Stability is very poor with Alembics in the viewport. Whether that means crashing or just rendering corrupt geometry, Alembic has always been a problem in Houdini.

Are things better with USDs?

HristoVelev
Are things better with USDs?

I haven't used them enough to know. They aren't really a viable replacement for Alembic though. They are too slow to use as a geometry format, where the geometry has to be unpacked every frame, and they cannot be used with Mantra for rendering. They are only useful in the context of Solaris, where rendering is done with Karma or other Hydra plugins.

I see, thanks. We're on the way to start pushing through Solaris and Karma and it would be useful to know if it's much more reliable and a fast track is worth the trouble, if you have an idea about that

My bad - had an error with an asset, where there was some live geometry together with the Alembics - removed that and things improved dramatically, haven't had a crash since the morning