Hey folks.

I noticed in the current production build that generating a flipbook is incredibly slow compared to earlier versions. I did a simple animation that plays just fine in real time on the timeline. When I invoked the flipbook it was taking more than a second per frame.

One object. Smooth wired shaded. Default head lamp. Low poly.

Anyone else having this issue?

Yes, me too. Very annoying, hope it gets fixed soon.

Yes me too, always waiting for a new prod build ...

Flipbooks are generating at full speed in build 478 on Windows, if that helps.

It's been reported elsewhere that web licencing is affecting mplay for some people, swapping back to local licencing fixes.

I've not been having this issue so I can't confirm.

I can confirm I have the same issue and mestela is right. I have two license servers added in the License Administrator.
One local, and one only accessible when my work VPN is active. Removing the work server from the list made the flipbook generation go back to normal speed.

Guess Houdini is trying to check if it can reach all license servers for each frame it's "rendering"..

Hi, do you know what version of Houdini and hserver you are using? If you're using H19 the new licensing system might alleviate some of the issues. I think what's happening is that each frame has to go back to sesinetd to request a new license and under login licensing that can be a larger request time (has to contact servers in Toronto) than an on-site license server.

Cheers,

The local licensing server does not work on my computer. I've dealt with tech support twice on this and in the end they said I needed to go back to sidefx remote licensing server. So this may not work for you.

mattw
Hi, do you know what version of Houdini and hserver you are using? If you're using H19 the new licensing system might alleviate some of the issues. I think what's happening is that each frame has to go back to sesinetd to request a new license and under login licensing that can be a larger request time (has to contact servers in Toronto) than an on-site license server.

Cheers,

In my case it's License Administrator 19.0.498. It was the same issue with .455.
My localhost server is listed first. When I ran into the issue, the local server have all the licenses I needed, but I guess mplay perhaps still pings all the license servers for each frame - and it would wait for a timeout from the second listed server since the VPN was disabled. Just a guess here..