Chris Lesage

I'm on a 2016 MBP with the Radeon Pro 455 card.

In general, I find things to be quite stable. I do seem to always crash Houdini when I exit the program, but that doesn't affect my work in any way.

And for context, I'm doing mostly VEX and motion graphics stuff, as well as getting into modelling, rigging and animation. Basically sticking to the Houdini Core features and occasional particles. So I can't talk about the stability of any large-production dynamics, fluids, etc. I'm not even doing very much rendering yet.

If I want to do those things more in the future, I'll be investigating using a workstation or a cloud solution. But for now I'm very happy with the experience.

Edit: I'm also just reading up on the fact that official external GPU support is coming to Macos High Sierra. So that might help things in the future as well.

For things where you want the state to change over time, the solver does work perfectly and you can control sub-steps too. But often, your attributes and geometry can simply evolve over time, or be driven by a single parameter, and then you can just use frames or time or a parameter to measure instead.

Here is a very simple bouncing ball “Hello World” I did using the solver sop. When it reaches a certain value it bounces and reverses direction in that axis. Dive into the solver sop to see the VEX code.

Also, man I love that bees-bombs thread!

Hi alexpi,

I am using a Macbook Air from 2012. It works just fine, but as I posted in another thread, I run into heat issues when I am running PointWrangles on 100x100 to 200x200 grids, after about a minute of playback. So I just have to stop playback occasionally.

I was able to get through the CGWorkshop “Vex in Houdini” and all of the example projects ran just fine on my Air. (Heat issues aside.)

Rendering is also very slow, but I'll be looking into network rendering if I get serious into Houdini.

I am quite new to Houdini, but I think to successfully use laptops, you'll want to take advantage of disk caching and clever optimizations as much as possible.

I also sculpt in 3D-Coat with millions of voxels and develop basic games in Unity3D with very little issue on the Air.

Are you planning on doing any real-time work like performances?