I have been following the crowd intro tutorial, in which you click on the “simulate crowd” shelf tool, with an empty scene, and a crowd appears. However when i click on crowd then press enter twice I get an error box saying Error: Nothing was selected. Also when i click on the crowd examples they wont load either. Any help much appreciated, thanks.

you have to hold the ctrl and click that button in the new version of H

For the other error, you should update to at least 15.5.493 - there were some issues in Apprentice due to the Channel ROP being unavailable

Thanks patar and cwhite I downloaded 15.5.502, now I have both problems resolved. I appreciate your help and quick response, very grateful.

I had the same question! Glad to find the answer…BTW I'm a MAC guy..anything else special I need to know because of that?

Pete_S
BTW I'm a MAC guy..anything else special I need to know because of that?

The graphics drivers on Mac are problematically buggy. The guy with forum username twod, who works on the viewport code, has done an amazing job finding ways to guess what they're doing wrong and figuring out ways to work around the driver bugs, but for some, there's nothing that can be done. Sometimes Houdini has to fall back to using extremely slow software OpenGL drivers.

For things that don't use OpenGL, the performance of Houdini on Mac tends to be not quite as good as the performance on Linux, but better than the performance on Windows, primarily because Houdini uses 3 different memory allocators, and also Visual Studio 2015 produces some embarrassingly inefficient code on Windows. We'd like to use jemalloc to allocate memory on all platforms, but there are some roadblocks making that difficult.

The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is that we found out recently that Mac OS has a hard limit of 128GB of virtual memory, so if you have 64GB of memory and a process uses that and 64GB of swap, the process will be killed, even if there's more swap space available. Not many people splurge to buy such an expensive Mac, though, since when I checked a month or two ago, it costs 4x as much money as an equivalent system with Linux or Windows (~$6K vs. ~$1.5K).

Thanks for the reply. I'm using the mac trashcan, with the 700 AMD card, ad I have to say, I am very impressed so fa with the speed. The sim speed is amazingly fast. My one issue is on a 4k screen, the UI the is super small…even at the max size set in the prefs. I see it;s been a bit of an issue.

My main worry is that the tutorials are different…like the question above, my “sim” did nothing like the tutorial. I'l try it tomorrow…as today was day 1 with Houdini!

Thanks again.

ndickson

Pete_S
BTW I'm a MAC guy..anything else special I need to know because of that?

The graphics drivers on Mac are problematically buggy. The guy with forum username twod, who works on the viewport code, has done an amazing job finding ways to guess what they're doing wrong and figuring out ways to work around the driver bugs, but for some, there's nothing that can be done. Sometimes Houdini has to fall back to using extremely slow software OpenGL drivers.

For things that don't use OpenGL, the performance of Houdini on Mac tends to be not quite as good as the performance on Linux, but better than the performance on Windows, primarily because Houdini uses 3 different memory allocators, and also Visual Studio 2015 produces some embarrassingly inefficient code on Windows. We'd like to use jemalloc to allocate memory on all platforms, but there are some roadblocks making that difficult.

The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is that we found out recently that Mac OS has a hard limit of 128GB of virtual memory, so if you have 64GB of memory and a process uses that and 64GB of swap, the process will be killed, even if there's more swap space available. Not many people splurge to buy such an expensive Mac, though, since when I checked a month or two ago, it costs 4x as much money as an equivalent system with Linux or Windows (~$6K vs. ~$1.5K).