What's the most reliable way to refresh textures in viewport?

By "refresh textures", I mean when the model in the viewport has a material with texture (e.g. Lab Quick Material with a base color map), and the texture file is modified, how to make Houdini reloads the texture file from the disk and display the modified texture in viewport?

The modification may happen externally (for example, in image editor, or the texture is re-exported from Substance Painter, etc) so Houdini has to reload it from the disk.

I've tried:

- Labs -> Reset viewport (never works)

- Clear cache in Cache Manager (never works)

- Clear Texture Cache shelf tool (never works)

- texcache -c (never works)

- Display Option -> Material -> Update (never works)

- Render -> Update Textures (sometimes it works, but this is basically a "crash houdini" button)

It can't be this hard to refresh textures in viewport, right? There must be a reliable way...

ok strange I always use this option: - Render -> Update Textures
And I don't get crashes with that.

Cheers
CYTE

CYTE
ok strange I always use this option: - Render -> Update Textures
And I don't get crashes with that.

Cheers
CYTE

I hope so. But it does crash often for me. The worst part is when it doesn't crash, it doesn't always work either. Like it only works for 20% of the time.

I would be so happy if it's a button that I can reliably use. But it's just a nope:

I feel your pain. It must be not very pleasant. But I think its not a general problem but might be specific to your setup. See here is how it looks on my side. Have you tried renaming your user folder so Houdini creates a new one. Maybe its something in there causing this issue.

Cheers
CYTE

CYTE
I feel your pain. It must be not very pleasant. But I think its not a general problem but might be specific to your setup. See here is how it looks on my side. Have you tried renaming your user folder so Houdini creates a new one. Maybe its something in there causing this issue.

Cheers
CYTE

I've tried it with a clean Houdini (preference folder renamed, Houdini just reinstalled). Same thing.

It's even worse than what I've shown actually. For example if I copy the Quick Material node, the two 100% identitical nodes can display different textures, one updated and one outdated (or one outdated one blank, or anything, depending on how stars align today).

I have kinda accepted Houdini can't properly display texture long time ago (from ~H18.5). But since SideFX seems to be working hard on Copernicus I told myself this time it would be different...

Thanks for your help & gif. I guess Houdini just... hates me.

Any news about this?

Ive tried cache and render update texture.
Works only once, then I always got "file is already in use or was left open by another application" warning in PS
So after that I have to quit and reopen Houdini