Depth Map Shadows Crashing

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Hello,

I am trying to render shadows using depth map shadows, but Mantra is crashing. When I MMB over the red-striped node, the error message is “Command Error Code: 1”. The weird thing about this problem is that rendering depth map shadows worked two weeks ago, but now they have stopped working. Is there a setting that I accidently messed up?

Thank you very much for you help in advance.
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I can confirm this: when I enable shadow maps mantra crashes. When I click render nothing happens: mantra appears in the activity monitor but the cpu is idle as is the memory.

This occurs with both 9.5.350 and 9.5.371

The computer is:

Dual Core Mac Pro
4 GB Ram
OSX 10.5.6
Nvidia 7300

It's odd in that I've had shadow maps working fine recently and I'm not sure when it stopped working. I have the same problem with my computer at home (also running OSX).

Attachments:
example.hipnc (152.1 KB)

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Depth map shadows are working for me in 9.5.378 . Could it be you do not have permission to write the shadow maps to your chosen location on disk ?

R
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Hi,

Cheers for the reply. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to be a permissions problem.

It is really odd.

I tried saving the hip file to a folder on my desktop since I know the permissions are fine there.

When I rendered the scene the shadow.rat file was created and written to. However mplay did not pop up and the mantra process stays running but is apparently doing nothing.

Really rather confused as to why it's not working. I bet the answer is probably something really simple, but I've tried it now across 3 computers with the same result on all of them (although they are all running osx, if that is a factor).

Any ideas? I might try downloading 9.5.378 to see if that works, however since I've tried three different builds (9.5.350, 9.5.365 and 9.5.372) I'm not sure that it'd make much odds.
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Ok I have recreated your problem I think , depth map shadows do not work on osx 9.5.360 , the scene does not crash , but just wont render in mplay.

R
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Yup that'd be the problem.

I tried uninstalling Houdini, removing the preferences folder in the home directory and installing 9.5.379 (there didn't appear to be an osx build of 9.5.378). Still no luck.

I also tried rendering to a file rather than mplay, in case there was some problem with mplay, but it still stops working after generating the shadow map.

It's good to know that it's not me doing something stupid and that it is reproducible. Still stumped on how to remedy it though.
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Hi,

I'm still having the same problem with the depth map shadows - the shadow map renders but the actual scene fails to render. This only happens with depth map shadows - raytracing and pbr both work fine. This seems to be osx specific, as everything is working fine on windows, although unfortunetely my HD license is for osx.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? I've tried installing different builds to no avail. The odd thing is depth mapped shadows used to work, however I've had the same problem on three computers (two mac pros and a macbook). If this is a bug then should I sumbit a bug report? I would have thought that there would have come across it if it was a general osx bug…
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Hi, this is happening to me with build 379 on OS X.5.6
Any workaround out there ? As I can't find any other solution to render motion blured shadows.
Will check with more recent build if available.
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379 seems to be the last H9 build, so I reported the bug with the web form.
Strange that OSX doesn't appear in the “Operating System” thing :?
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Hi all,

Good news from support :


Hello Umxprime,

This is fixed in Houdini 10, our next major release. I asked the developer if it is possible to backport the fix to 9.5
and will be back at you…


So wait & see OSX users
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Well, bad news for 9.5…

Hello Umxprime,

Unfortunately, we are unable to backport this fix to 9.5… :-(
Cheers,

So we have to wait for H10.
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