Since the 20.5 I have quite frequent crashes (like ~10 daily) when working with Animation Editor. I am trying to reproduce it, and SideFX Support also tried it with many of my inaccurate descriptions. Unfortunately I don't know what is the main reason for A.E. to become "broken" so I would like anybody to give me some hint, what to try.

A.E. "gets broken" after few minutes or hours of work. Then it behaves this way:

- I don't see the Time Bar (although it is turned on)
- I don't see the rectangular selection marquee (when selecting keyframes)
- I am not able to pan the channels in A.E.
- the keyframes get multiplied

Multiplication of keyframes looks like this:
- I move a keyframe (let's say from time 10 to time 50)
- I play the animation
- I press Ctrl+Z
- the keyframe goes back to the time 10, but the keyframe at time 50 remains in the channel, so now I have both of them

This is usually followed by a Houdini crash after few more clicks.


It probably helps to delete "hchanneleditor.pref" before the next session, but I don't have any other clue what could be the main cause. It seems to happen more often when I animate sources for a GPU simulation ... then, houdini is not responsive "often" (which is normal) ... and A.E. gets corrupted more often.

I have Windows 11, current Houdini daily build (usually) and I have the newest nvidia studio drivers.

Try closing the Animation Editor and opening up a fresh one in a new pane.

eikonoklastes, thank you very much. I will try that!

I have also tried to uninstall Houdini 20.5 and install it again. Some of the test scenes that I had seem to work fine so far (even with the "faulty" hchanneleditor.pref). So, I hope, that it was only a glitch.

In the past, I had a crash during an update to a daily build. The update crashed (probably) because I had a Houdini instance running in another desktop and I did not notice it (I have already filed a RFE, that the Launcher should check that). Launcher reported, that the Repair of the update was successful, but ... maybe it wasn't.

I will send more information to the SideFX support.

Thank you very much again!

same here my Houdini 20.5 has been crashing non-stop when I try to animate.
Sometimes I select a key and move my mouse left click it glitches the key to somewhere else.
please fix it.

Hi Rifs. On my computer, everything got fixed when I uninstalled Houdini and reinstalled it again. I have no such problems anymore.

Hi ikoon, I did the same I thought it was gone last weekend. it comes back again.
try animate with the file you had problem with it might bring it back...

however, deleting "hchanneleditor.pref" did help! thanks for the tip. but still not a long-term solution hey.

I have exactly the same issues in Linux and have to delete "hchanneleditor.pref" once or twice a session.

I would really like to help. I was really thinking, what may have I done to fix it. But I believe that I only uninstalled and reinstalled Houdini. Now I don't have those issues. I moved my pref dir out of synced documents (OneDrive), but that alone did not help I believe.

I had a Perforce package installed for a little while (which was introduced few days later, as a part of Houdini). But that is probably not related too.

You were right, after few flawless weeks, I have the same issue, again.

This time I was working on a Vellum simulation, animating some forces (inside the dopnet), interrupting the simulation, tweaking the keyframes... running the sim again ... and then duplicated keyframes occurred and Houdini crashed after few more clicks.

I am on 20.5.370 currently (since it was released), nothing else have changed on my PC.

I had two instances of Houdini running at the same time, when the issue occurred (one Houdini was idle, with just a simple setup, no simulation).

(I have sent the crash log and .hiplc file to Side FX so that they could try to reproduce it again)

Btw I have:
- Nvidia drivers 560.81
- RTX 4090
- Two monitors

I don't know what else might be related to the issue.

Same problem here but that tip about deleting the hchanneleditor.pref worked thanks!

I have had many instances of this crash now. I animate:


- inside the Matnet, an "old" VEX Material builder, I animate the Environment Map rotation ("ogl_envrotate")
- current production build 20.5.445
- OpenGL viewport

So, this is not only "sensitive" to simulations with GPU.

Please, does this happen also with the viewport set to Vulkan?

Yes, this happens also with the viewport set to Vulkan.

Please, if anyone has any idea, what might be the steps to reproduce this issue, I would be really thankful.

It might be caused by working with the Animation Editor while cooking. But I am not able to successfully find simple steps to reproduce it.

I am sorry to spam the forum, but I am unable to reproduce the cause of this issue.

It is happening in H21 too (for me), so I will appreciate any clues.

Found the same issue in Houdini 20.5.684 on Windows 11.
Just checking if anyone had any luck with solving this.

Also, I couldn't find hchanneleditor.pref in my 20.5 directory. It's there in 21 though. Not sure why

I think that hchanneleditor.pref gets created once you set any changes to the Animation Editor preferences.

I have not found simple steps to reproduce the cause of this issue, so SideFX cannot reproduce it and fix it.

Please, do you use any extra packages, plugins or scripts? Or does the Animation Editor get corrupted even with the default Houdini install?