I got a scene that starts crashing when i attach a certain ammount of shaders with 4k textures to different objects in the scene.
I always work in either “wireframe” or “hidden line invisible” mode. but whenever I assign one of these shaders to an object, Houdini thinks for a moment, as if I have set viewport to display the textures, thus it needs to load it onto the graphics card. To me it seems like it's crashing because the ram on my graphic card, just simply has hit the limit, but it shouldn't be like this as long as I am in WireFrame mode.

Nor does my scene utilize the maximum ram on my computer, as it's using around 8 GB out of 15GB, before it starts crashing. What gives?

How many shaders are we talking with texture files . Are your 4k textures .rat files ? Is the shader the default mantra shader shipping with Houdini or a custom one.

Rob

Around 35 Mantra Surface shaders, with 4k .pic textures.

The problem does not occur if i assign a shader with no textures in it, Houdini starts thinking only when the shader that I assign to the object, has a texture in it.

Hi , thanks for the info. so applying the 4k textures and shaders to default geometry still throws up errors ? , Any chance you can put a scene up or email something.
I have no problems with 6 shaders and 4k textures for spec, dif , displacement on my machine. Although things take a while to compile which is expected as the default shader is a tad heavy.

Rob

Hi Circusmonkey,

Yeah still crashes, but I do not wish to take too much of your time, I just wanted to know if this is a known issue when dealing with heavy textured scenes using the default Manrta Surface Shader, or possible a Houdini 12 bug secretly trying to load textures into the viewport without me asking it to do so, because I never remember Maya ever having to ‘compile’ or calculate anything whenever I assign shaders onto geometry that is being displayed in wireframe in the viewport.

In general Houdini shouldn't worry about shaders or textures at all, until I hit the render button. this is what is confusing me.

knekker
Hi Circusmonkey,

Yeah still crashes, but I do not wish to take too much of your time, I just wanted to know if this is a known issue when dealing with heavy textured scenes using the default Manrta Surface Shader, or possible a Houdini 12 bug secretly trying to load textures into the viewport without me asking it to do so, because I never remember Maya ever having to ‘compile’ or calculate anything whenever I assign shaders onto geometry that is being displayed in wireframe in the viewport.

In general Houdini shouldn't worry about shaders or textures at all, until I hit the render button. this is what is confusing me.

Is it Houdini that crashes or Mantra that crashes?

If you're using lots of large textures, make sure they are converted to .rat format. This will cause only the required portions of the textures to be loaded at one time.

If you have 4k .exr files, mantra will load the entire image and convert to a .rat internally. This will use way more memory. This is true for any format other than .rat.

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the reply, judging by your post, I take it that .pic format is a no go then, when it comes to using large number of big textures?

You may want to check out “help texcache” in Houdini's texport.

this doesn't sound like a mantra issue - it sounds like Houdini is loading the textures when the shader is assigned….even in wireframe - which it should not do…
try assigning the shaders in manual cook mode - bottom right change Auto Update to Manual

Hey actor,

Actually I tried something similar. I have different parts of the house split into groups, and while being in one of the groups, I have the display set to ‘hide other objects’. so the viewport only displays the objects from this group.
While in thie group, I just attached all these textured shaders onto everything. This works fine until I step out of the SOP back out to the ROP so everything will get displayed. When doing this, Houdini then crashes.

I have now tried your suggestion, switched to manual cooking, I applied all the textured shaders onto the objects that I needed, and started rendering. After 15 renders, Houdini crashed again.

you should send a file to SESI and if you can one of the textures…