I have a Houdini 14.0.395 apprentice license and have installed it and the Houdini Engine for Maya. However, while the plugin shows up in the plugin manager in Maya everytime I try to load it it says:

// Error: line 1: The specified procedure could not be found.
(houdiniEngine)

And if I try to browse for the .mll and load it manually I get:

// Error: file: CProgram Files/Autodesk/Maya2015/scripts/others/pluginWin.mel line 777: The specified procedure could not be found.
(houdiniEngine)

I have tried creating a Maya environment file and pointing the PATH to both my Houdini bin folder and Houdini Engine plugin folder (I did this both manually and from the MEL command line). I also copy and pasted the module file from the Engine folder into the Maya 2015 module folder. Both attempts give me the same errors.

Any ideas what could be wrong?

90ender
I have tried creating a Maya environment file and pointing the PATH to both my Houdini bin folder and Houdini Engine plugin folder (I did this both manually and from the MEL command line). I also copy and pasted the module file from the Engine folder into the Maya 2015 module folder. Both attempts give me the same errors.

Setting the PATH in Maya.env may not be sufficient, because Maya still ends up appending that to the actual PATH environment variable. Before loading the plugin, try running this MEL instead:
putenv PATH (“CProgram Files/Side Effects Software/Houdini 14.0.395/engine/maya/maya2015/../../../bin;” + `getenv PATH`)

Also, since you have an Apprentice license, there are two things that you should note:
1. Apprentice license isn't able to load Engine plugin. However, we do have a 30 days trial setup that you can activate. As soon as you try to load an asset, an activation dialog should pop up. It looks similar to the Apprentice activation dialog.
2. You can only load commercial assets. So you wouldn't be able to load non-commercial assets (.hdanc) that you've created from Apprentice. There are also plenty of assets that you can try out from Orbolt [orblt.com] (www.orbolt.com). Also, from here [sidefx.com]:

The assets that you create from Houdini Apprentice are “non-commercial” assets. At the moment, they are not allowed to be loaded into Houdini Engine, which is for commercial use.

However, there is a way to convert them into commercial assets! If you upload and share your non-commercial assets onto Orbolt [orblt.com] (www.orbolt.com), our online asset store, then you can download them back as commercial assets. You can then load those assets into Houdini Engine!

Thanks for the response and sorry I couldn't reply until now. I have a couple questions regarding your post.

putenv PATH (“CProgram Files/Side Effects Software/Houdini 14.0.395/engine/maya/maya2015/../../../bin;” + `getenv PATH`)

Does this file path mean that I need to point the PATH variable at the $HOME/bin directory or the $HOME/engine/maya/maya2015 directory?

Also how exactly do you activate the 30 day trial? When I downloaded Houdini Apprentice it popped up with an option to install Houdini Engine which I clicked. Is there something else I need to do to activate it?

Okay so I tried your exact MEL expression which ended up pointing the PATH variable to my $HOME/bin (which is what I had been doing before), as well as making sure Houdini Engine was activated using the instructions in this post:

https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=39229 [sidefx.com]

Unfortunately I am still getting the same error:

// Error: line 1: The specified procedure could not be found.
(houdiniEngine)

At this point I am completely lost as what could be the problem. Any ideas would be a huge help.

It should end up pointing to something like:

CProgram Files/Side Effects Software/Houdini 14.0.395/bin

The goal of that MEL is to make sure the Houdini bin directory comes first in the PATH environment, and this has to be done before any attempt to load Houdini engine.

There are also some rare cases where some DLLs in C:\Windows\System32 is conflicting with Houdini. The ones that I've seen are OpenCL.dll and half.dll. Could you check if either of that exist in your system32 directory? If not, maybe there's another problematic DLL in there that I haven't seen yet, so it might help if you can attach a list of DLLs from that directory.

Neither of those .dll exist in my System32 folder. How would I create a list of all of them short of slowly copy pasting each name?

Also as a side note, I am using the trial version of Maya 2015. Not sure if this should make any differences.

Actually, since you can run Python in Maya, try running this Python script:
import os
import sys
houdini_dir = “C:\\Program Files\\Side Effects Software\\Houdini 14.0.395\\bin”
houdini_dlls = set()
paths = os.environ.split(“;”)
paths.append(“C:\\Windows\\System32”)
for p in paths:
if “Houdini” in p:
print “Skipping”, p
continue
try:
dlls = set()
except:
print “Could not list”, p
matched_dlls = houdini_dlls & dlls
if matched_dlls:
print “From”, p
for dll in matched_dlls:
print “ ”, dll


This will go through all the DLLs in the PATH environment and output which ones might conflict with Houdini.

For me, this outputted something like:
CProgram Files/Autodesk/Maya2014/bin
tbb.dll
qthelp4.dll
qtopengl4.dll
qtcore4.dll
qtgui4.dll
tbbmalloc_proxy.dll
qtxml4.dll
phonon4.dll
qtwebkit4.dll
qtnetwork4.dll
tbbmalloc.dll
qttest4.dll
ptex.dll
qtscript4.dll
qtdesignercomponents4.dll
qtsvg4.dll
qtdesigner4.dll
qtsql4.dll
Could not list CProgram Files (x86)/Windows Kits/8.0/Windows Performance Toolkit/
Skipping CProgram Files/Side Effects Software/Houdini 15.0.179.25/engine/maya/maya2014/../../../bin

Thanks for your help awong.

So I in my system variables I had added the $HFS/bin path to my “path” environment variable. I decided to create a new variable named “PATH” there and wallah, it worked.

Thanks again for everything!

So since Houdini Apprentice cannot create usable assets for Houdini Engine, my company upgraded the license to Houdini Indie and got the Houdini Engine Indie license too since they are supposed to be able to work together. So now my computer has a license for both the standard Houdini Engine and the Indie version as well. However after installing the licenses I am still getting the error:

// Error: HAPI Error: Limmited commercial (Indie) assets not allowed with commercial licenses.

Is this due to some sort of license conflict perhaps?

Yeah, the trial license is treated as a commercial license, which doesn't load Indie assets. Since you now have a Indie license, you should comment out the Engine trial license. This way, the Maya plugin will use the Indie license, which will allow you to load the Indie assets. You can find the license file here:
C:\Windows\keys\licenses

That works! Thanks a ton once again!