Hi,

I just downloaded Houdini Apprentice on Kim's recommendation. I'm having problems starting it. The issue is incomprehensible to me, and difficult to explain so I have taken three screenshots that capture the issue.

The first screenshot is the initial error on start up:
http://www.exocortex.org/HoudiniStartUpError1.png [exocortex.org]

I had to time that screenshot well since that error message disappears quickly and is replaced by this error message:
http://www.exocortex.org/HoudiniStartUpError2.png [exocortex.org]

Unfortunately these particular error logs are all empty. Except there is one additional crash dump that contains some information. You can see that here:
http://www.exocortex.org/HoudiniStartUpError3.png [exocortex.org]

My computer setup is pretty vanilla. I have, after reading some other posts, totally disabled my development machines firewall. But that doesn't appear to have changed anything. There was one error during the install of Houdini about a font that was already installed. I have rebooted after install just to ensure that wasn't the issue.

Any help is appreciated.

Best regards,
Ben Houston
http://www.exocortex.org/ben [exocortex.org]

Hello,

What OS (XP32, 64, vista?) and what graphic card?
Also, as a suggestion, you might try downloading the latest 9.1 beta build from here:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_download&Itemid=208 [sidefx.com]

scroll down to daily builds and choose 9.1.133 (or whatever is the most recent).

Dragos

Thanks for the reply.

The OS on that machine is Windows XP SP2 (32 bit) with 2 GB of ram. The video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT with 128 MB of ram. My development machine is about as average as you can get these days.

I am downloading the daily build now.

Is your Houdini installed on a non-local drive? Or something special about the place where you installed it?

It is installed on C:\ here

C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 9.0.794

I got the latest build of Houdini working on a Vista machine (my laptop.) I'll try that same version on my dev machine now.

Damn. The new build fails the same way on my dev machine. I installed it into the default location (that did work on my Vista machine):

C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 9.1.124.10

Thus it appears that my development machine is cursed or jinxed.

EDIT: I'm not so sure what the problem is. How about trying to run “hkey -n” from the Command Line Tools. Does that work?

I am having the same problems. I just installed Houdini Apprentice 9.0.0.794 on my Dell XPS M1710 laptop. It's 2ghz core 2 duo, 2gb ram, 512mb geforce 7950gtx. Runnin XP Pro SP2

When I start Master or Escape I immediately get “hkey.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close” also happens when I start License Administrator.

I have not seen any of the same things that the OP has in the screenshots though.

I also tried disabling my firewall and rebooting, no change. I just tried the command line hkey -n. The license admin tries to start but then disappears and I get the same hkey.exe error.

On a long shot, try setting the environment variable, HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE to the value, 1. To do this, right-click on My Computer, choose Properties. Now navigate to Advanced > Environment Variables. Under System Variables, choose New. Enter in HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE for the Variable Name and 1 for the Variable Value. Click OK until all the dialogs close again. Now try hkey -n again.

Hmm … also try turning off any antivirus / malware checker / etc just in case.

It looks like that did the trick!

I am not getting the error and I actually got a window asking about getting a license now.

Can you explain what exactly that environment variable did?

And thank you very much!

That variable tells Houdini to NOT use the hardware accelerated OpenGL driver but use Microsoft's software OpenGL driver instead. So now the question, is which video driver are you using that's causing Houdini to crash?

Instead of HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE, try setting HOUDINI_OGL_DISABLE_FBO_RENDER_TO_TEXTURE to 1. If that doesn't work, try setting HOUDINI_OGL_DISABLE_FBO to 1. Make sure you remove the other HOUDINI environment variables when you add the new one.

I'm using the driver that was installed by Dell on my system. I have not updated the video drivers. Curious that it was having a problem with my hardware opengl driver…

I tried the HOUDINI_OGL_DISABLE_FBO_RENDER_TO_TEXTURE and that also allows me to run Houdini.

HOUDINI_OGL_DISABLE_FBO did NOT allow me to run.

Does this mean that since I am not disabling OGL hardware that my video driver is not the issue?

Well, it means that your OpenGL hardware driver isn't supporting frame buffer objects properly. So most likely, you need to update your video drivers.

I just bought an HP dv9743cl laptop
which comes with Vista Home/Premium,
and installed Apprentice.

The machine config is
Intel T7250 (Centrino Core2 Duo) 2.0 GHz
3070 GB RAM
GeForce 8600M GS 512 MB RAM

I found that Appentice 9.1.124 VC8 fails installation
during the gfont.exe step, and that all SESI
tools and programs fail after install (hkey,
Houdini, etc.) with a “idialog.exe” failed message.

I tried the VC7 version and installation proceeded
normally, and all tools work properly.

I am sending a copy of this info to support@sidefx.com

-Dave Remba

We've seen one other similar issue like that. Here is the reply that helped resolve it:

One possibility is that the installer encountered a bad truetype font.
Unfortunately, this happens from time to time due to the inherent nature of the
truetype font format. This installation step isn't necessary if you do not need
to use truetype fonts in Houdini and it can be rerun later if needed. So on
your system, first try to get Houdini installed without this step. Just kill
gfont.exe from the Task Manager.

Once Houdini is installed, we can debug the issue as follows:
1. Launch Command Line Tools from the Start Menu under
Side Effects Software > Houdini X.X.XXX.
2. Run this command: gfont -Sv This will generate verbose processing.
If the program stalls at any given point in time for longer than a minute, then
that is probably a bad font. If you send us that font file, then we can try to
fix gfont so that it can handle it.

OK, I will try the gfont command and send you info
via support@sidefx.com. BTW, this was an install to
a new out of the box HP laptop with factory
installed Vista. I hadn't installed any fonts,
although I did install firefox and iTunes.
Thanks for your help-

-Dave Remba

Hi,

just reading this as I also had troubles on Win7 X64 and Houdini 10.

In my case the install would just sit there without any further process (checking on installation details revealed it was sitting on gFont.exe)

Running gfont -Sv gave the hint of insufficient rights on font.index (that exists in the font folder in Houdini's install dir). I had to manually set correct rights to both the font.index as well as the font folder it lives in.

Just thought I'd mention it for others

cheers
Ron