Rakesh Malik

In Houdini 20.5.445, I've started getting this error recently. Every time I start up Houdini now; I think the only changes were a windows update and new nVidia drivers; there's no new hardware or anything like that. I even uninstalled and re-installed 445, and no dice. The only 3rd party renderer I have installed is RenderMan, which I've been working with for several weeks without any problems like this.

Any idea as to what might be causing this?

I'm also wondering if it's related to Houdini's new behavior of crashing my computer regularly; now I can't select the contents of a dialog in a the attributes panel without a BSOD.

Any suggestions? I'm dead in the water right now.

How does that work with the biomes tools? Would I then create the points for the tree scatter and then feed that into an instancer in Solaris?

My first attempts using the instancer in Solares haven't produced any results so far. I proabbly have something not set up correctly.

Should I put the biomes scatter and instance network into the LOP instancer?

I had forgotten that you can build a node network inside that node, so I haven't tried doing that yet.

I'm trying to learn how to use the Biomes toolkit, and I'm running into problems with the Instance node. It's very, very slow at best and crashes Houdini often. Switching from point cloud to bounding boxes or vice versa often crashes Houdini entirely.

I've even tried caching the point clouds, caching the tree geometry, which I've decimated to cut the poly count, and nothing seems to be effective.

I tried creating a new Instance node and set it to display as bounding boxes before connecting it, then tried to import that to Solaris to see if it would render, but just importing the SOP to Solaris leads to a huge CPU load with nothing to show -- no points, no bounding boxes, and I can't interact with the viewport.

Any advice? Am I doing something wrong here?

Thanks!