Hi,

I installed Houdini apprentice the other day on my iMac. It installed fine but as soon as I try to do anything such as adding and moving a box it locks up and I have to do a hard reboot.

My system is old but according to the supported cards it should work.

My iMac is (21-inch, Late 2009)
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (256mb)
OpenGL 3.3
OpenCL 1.0
16 gb ram

Now I could tolerate a crash occasionally as it is 3D software after all but I can't do anything with Houdini right now.

In contrast I also use Lightwave and I can load and work with scene files with over 6 million polygons with the scene taking 8 gb of memory and my graphic card can handle that so I should be able to do at least simple scenes with Houdini.

I usually do 3D on my PC but right now it needs a new graphics card. I am thinking of getting either a 970, 980, Titan X or the upcoming 980 Ti. Will those work well with Houdini. I am sure they would fare better than my old 9400M.

Thanks,
JS

If you're not on OSX 10.10.3, try upgrading to that. Apple has fixed a lot of problems in their graphics driver since 10.9 and even early 10.10 builds.

OK thanks. I'm still on 10.9.5. I was planning to upgrade soon anyway so I will try that.

I have the same problem on the macmini. I can create the object when I dive into it Houdini just crashes. This bug renders the entire Houdini app useless. I upgraded and the 10.10 did not fix my problem. Tech blames it on the IntelHD4000 drivers, who am I to argue that, but Houdini R13 works fine.

Please report back if it works for you I would be interested to see if your nVidia drivers make all the difference.

js33
I usually do 3D on my PC but right now it needs a new graphics card. I am thinking of getting either a 970, 980, Titan X or the upcoming 980 Ti. Will those work well with Houdini. I am sure they would fare better than my old 9400M.

980 is powerful and butter smooth, the others should even be better. Skip the 970 for it's last 0.5GB bogus vram issues.

Enivob
Tech blames it on the IntelHD4000 drivers, who am I to argue that, but Houdini R13 works fine.

You can always double check yourself by booting the machine into Windows. In my experience OsX is significantly behind on OpenGL drivers than other platforms.

You can always double check yourself by booting the machine into Windows.

I l already have a Windows machine successfully running R14. The MacMINI has a small SSD drive which I would not want to partition just to get another Windows box. I mainly use it for screen capturing and tutorial work. Which has kind of put me on hold in that area.

What bugs me is people keep pointing the finger at the OpenGL drivers and offering steps as if it is my fault that Houdini is crashing. The problem is clearly a bug in Houdini, an unhandled exception. And I am not buying that response because R13 still works fine.

IMHO some inexperienced coder wrote some bad code that got released. When you write an IF statement you are supposed to write an ELSE as well. At the simplest level of explanation, this was not done.

Even if the OSX drivers are crap (Blender works fine, Adobe works fine etc..) a programmer should write the code so it does not crash the program. Even if certain viewport features are not implemented.

And I did upgrade to 10.10 which was supposed to solve all the problems. Tech claimed that the new OpenGL drivers in the latest OSX release really did fix problems that were previously present. But the crash still exists even after I upgraded to the latest. This leads me to think that the Houdini coders really need to take a second look at what is going on with their support of IntelHD4000 chips and either support it or change the minimum specs to eliminate the problem if they can't solve this technical issue.