I can load your file on my Windows machine with nVidia GTX 2GB vRAM and on my MacMini using HD4400 with only 1.5Gb vRAM.

What is going on is the OBJ is so large that viewport clipping is removing it entirely from display. So it looks like the File node did not load anything.

Press the D-KEY to bring up the display options and activate the Viewport TAB. Set the clipping to Neither Clip Plane and crank up the far clip value. I set mine to 18,000 and the OBJ appeared in my viewport.

Or scale it down to a smaller size as Michael mentioned.

arctor
Houdini does generate crash reports. Try looking in your /tmp or /TEMP folder (I can't remember where it is on Windows)

send a crash report to support@sidefx.com and maybe arrange to upload the obj (we're under every NDA you can imagine).
please include all the info from Help > About Houdini > Show Details - you can just cut and paste that txt.

I have a feeling it's your graphics card but I'm not the best person to say…

How could it be my graphics card, when all other 3d apps are loading it just fine

I fail to see the logic here.

Artye
It's probably your graphics card ram causing issues. That mesh hits ~2.6gb Vram usage when editing full screen on a 4k monitor. It's totally smooth to work with on Nvidia 980, OsX.

No, its not my hardware. This mesh loads just fine in all other 3d apps , even blender which atm is dog slow in edit mode due to OLD gl code usage

Enivob
I can load your file on my Windows machine with nVidia GTX 2GB vRAM and on my MacMini using HD4400 with only 1.5Gb vRAM.

What is going on is the OBJ is so large that viewport clipping is removing it entirely from display. So it looks like the File node did not load anything.

Press the D-KEY to bring up the display options and activate the Viewport TAB. Set the clipping to Neither Clip Plane and crank up the far clip value. I set mine to 18,000 and the OBJ appeared in my viewport.

Or scale it down to a smaller size as Michael mentioned.

I"m afraid I can't even do that right now, as HOudini wont' respond at all ( says not responding in top frame of UI ), and I tried letting it go for a very long time , but I stopped it after 30 or so seconds, as it was taking up around 80% CPU .

Is it likely it would create a crash report after I purposely closed it ?

Not finding any houdini files in TEMP folder so unless I know for sure where to look I can't get that information ( assuming there is any, given Houdini didn't officially crash )

Just because something loads in another application doesn't mean that the issue isn't with your graphics card - it might just be that Houdini is more strict about openGL…

try this:
run an empty Houdini session
in the botom right corner of the interface is a dropdown that says “Auto Update” - change that to read “Manual”, this will stop the viewport from updating, you'll see some text at the top that says “Update Mode is Manual. View May Be Out Of Date”

now in the network, place a geo operator, inside use the file SOP to browse to your obj, make sure that “Show Sequence as One Entry” is OFF

after the file SOP, append a transform SOP and make it the display SOP (click the far right flag), set the Uniform Scale to 0.001
above the viewport there is a button to select the way you view the geometry in the viewport - set it to “Wireframe Bounding Box”

now change the dropdown back to “Auto Update”

space + g in the viewport should frame up the geometry - it'll just be a box, but at least this way it should load.

Well this is weird.

I fixed it not showing up by taking it back into meshmixer, recentering and saving it again.

That says it wasn't my hardware all along, but somehow the way in which houdini loads objects ?

Its no longer ‘ not responding’ anymore, it loads at least, so thats a good first step.

I didn't know until just now , literally

Taking note for future refernce of your above comment.