raincole
I honestly don't remember the last time my Blender crashed. Houdini still crashes weekly when I'm lucky.

There are certainly some cool Blender features I would love to see in Houdini, but Blender's stability (or lack thereof) is definitely not one. Not sure what version of Blender you are using but my vanilla installation of Blender 3.4 (with no addons) crashes far more often than Houdini when doing anything beyond basic modelling. Good luck trying to keep Blender alive for more than 15 minutes when doing even the most basic RBD sim, haha. Houdini is no crash juggernaut (looking at you, UV tools), but saying that it is less stable than Blender is laughable.

asorgejr

raincole
I honestly don't remember the last time my Blender crashed. Houdini still crashes weekly when I'm lucky.

There are certainly some cool Blender features I would love to see in Houdini, but Blender's stability (or lack thereof) is definitely not one. Not sure what version of Blender you are using but my vanilla installation of Blender 3.4 (with no addons) crashes far more often than Houdini when doing anything beyond basic modelling. Good luck trying to keep Blender alive for more than 15 minutes when doing even the most basic RBD sim, haha. Houdini is no crash juggernaut (looking at you, UV tools), but saying that it is less stable than Blender is laughable.

I'm comparing Blender's animation tool vs KineFX and Blender's rendering tool vs Karma XPU/LOP. Blender is far more stable to me. Perhaps when it comes to physical simulation and extremely complex scenes, Blender is worse. But Houdini is the only software that crashes in "simple" cases (like rigging or UV-unwrapping very low-poly models) I've ever used.

In 19.5, Solaris isn‘t a stable integration, but I‘m sure it will be much better in H20.
I guess it‘s a complicated task and rendering and it‘s interactivity has always been the biggest weakness in H.

raincole
I'm comparing Blender's animation tool vs KineFX and Blender's rendering tool vs Karma XPU/LOP. Blender is far more stable to me. Perhaps when it comes to physical simulation and extremely complex scenes, Blender is worse. But Houdini is the only software that crashes in "simple" cases (like rigging or UV-unwrapping very low-poly models) I've ever used.

I learned my brother houdini about 3 months ago what was intressting houdini crashed a lot on his machine.
We found out that microsoft teams (old client) when he has a voice or video call houdini will mostly crash.
Other smaller cause was the octane renderer but it could be reduced with updating the graphic driver. That fixed the most of the crashes.
The other part was the beginner lack of knowledge how you should work with houdini and how hoidini works. That just needed some time and houdini i now his primary DCC Software.

Sometimes it needs the knowlege why it crashes that takes time to analyse. Just saying the dcc software crashes a lot doesn't help nobody. Doesn't matter if it is houdini, blender,cinema 4d, maya, modo or 3ds max.

Clarisse is/was a tool where you could steal how data handling is managed.
It also crashed, but it is so responsive even with trillions of polygons in the scene.
But i‘m sure, H20 will very differ from 19.5.

I hope that karma xpu won't be exclusive for nvidia so amd graphics users can also enjoy this .

mandrake0
Sometimes it needs the knowlege why it crashes that takes time to analyse. Just saying the dcc software crashes a lot doesn't help nobody. Doesn't matter if it is houdini, blender,cinema 4d, maya, modo or 3ds max.

I mean... I had a quite long email thread between me and SideFX customer support. And I've installed clean new linux just for Houdini. And after all that effort and hassle, my conclusion is Houdini is generally quite unstable.

Again I'm glad if Houdini works stably for you or others. Maybe 18.5~19.5 is a particularly bad phase and I got into Houdini at the wrong time. It's just my experience.

raincole
I mean... I had a quite long email thread between me and SideFX customer support. And I've installed clean new linux just for Houdini. And after all that effort and hassle, my conclusion is Houdini is generally quite unstable.

sounds strange i used long time ago houdini under linux and i didn't had issues made even stupid test if i can render a 100k x 100k image. there was a time when houdini was unstable but it was just after a new release and they fixed in 2 months that it was stable again.

i had on my Ryzen Computer some problems / crashes in houdini after i changed in the BIOS a Random Math option (something like that) years ago. it could also be a firmware issue or Configuration on BIOS level when you made even a fresh Linux installation and it didn't help.

sad to hear that you have such a stability problem, from the distance it is very hard to analyse why it happens.

My 100k Test:
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/26669/ [www.sidefx.com]

Soothsayer
Personally I love the documentation, better than that of any other software I have used but maybe this is because I've used it for such a long time. Sometimes it's a bit inconsistent but I can live with that. Can somebody point me to some examples that illustrate the problem?

Fine, I’ll bite… Vex reference overview and more specifically the strings section doesn’t account for atoi/f, itoa, as well as the type casting section does not mention them at all, so if you don’t know specifically about atoi/itoa it’s time consuming to find.
So a high level of usage function improperly* named and not accounted for in the docs strings section. So from a perspective of a new user / artist with no programing bg, it is an issue, the docs assume too much in certain places that the user has a working knowledge of C lang. where atoi itoa is a common thing. Anyway this is just one of the doc issues.

mandrake0

raincole
I mean... I had a quite long email thread between me and SideFX customer support. And I've installed clean new linux just for Houdini. And after all that effort and hassle, my conclusion is Houdini is generally quite unstable.

sounds strange i used long time ago houdini under linux and i didn't had issues made even stupid test if i can render a 100k x 100k image. there was a time when houdini was unstable but it was just after a new release and they fixed in 2 months that it was stable again.

i had on my Ryzen Computer some problems / crashes in houdini after i changed in the BIOS a Random Math option (something like that) years ago. it could also be a firmware issue or Configuration on BIOS level when you made even a fresh Linux installation and it didn't help.

sad to hear that you have such a stability problem, from the distance it is very hard to analyse why it happens.

My 100k Test:
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/26669/ [www.sidefx.com]

You mean "Speed vs. reproducibility in Math Kernel Library" docs section, "MKL_CBWR=COMPATIBLE" variable?
Anyway Houdini is geared more towards Intel CPUs, and generally things tend to work better and faster on Intel, and the sheer brute speed of Amd cpus makes the speed issue less noticeable, when in fact houdini is not as fast as it could be on amd, and produces more crashes, most notably uv nodes, sweep, rbd’s and few others.

We need a Datasmith plugin for Houdini and Unreal that works the same way it does for C4D! This would be amazing. The Houdini Engines node-sync feature was a good start but really isn't very great.

hMonkey
Vex reference overview and more specifically the strings section doesn’t account for atoi/f, itoa

It does though? Unless, you're expecting them to document every single string function in the Overview section?

hMonkey
...if you don’t know specifically about atoi/itoa it’s time consuming to find.

This is the first result for me:

Regarding stability - Solaris is particularly crashy when you use spaces in your file names/paths. Once I removed all spaces, the stability leapfrogged for me. It's been pretty stable since then. Support tells me that they are working on improving stability with spaces in the names/paths, so that's okay with me.

Karma CPU has been extremely stable, but XPU does spaz more than I'd like. Hopefully, once it goes gold, it will be in better shape.

Pretty much all other contexts have been rock-solid for me.

mandrake0

raincole
I mean... I had a quite long email thread between me and SideFX customer support. And I've installed clean new linux just for Houdini. And after all that effort and hassle, my conclusion is Houdini is generally quite unstable.

sounds strange i used long time ago houdini under linux and i didn't had issues made even stupid test if i can render a 100k x 100k image. there was a time when houdini was unstable but it was just after a new release and they fixed in 2 months that it was stable again.

i had on my Ryzen Computer some problems / crashes in houdini after i changed in the BIOS a Random Math option (something like that) years ago. it could also be a firmware issue or Configuration on BIOS level when you made even a fresh Linux installation and it didn't help.

sad to hear that you have such a stability problem, from the distance it is very hard to analyse why it happens.

My 100k Test:
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/26669/ [www.sidefx.com]

sad to say, but houdini is unstable for me as well, it crashes quite often! it’s seriously the most fragile tool I use right now! sometimes I wonder if redshift is the issue, but I don’t t check cause even if it is I still need to render! going back and firth between LOPS and SOPS feels like a random function on the close(X) button. UV flatten or UV layout SOP will certainly crash it at some point, pressing escape key to exit simulation throws all sorts of errors and other simple things will crash houdini. I’m hoping many if the issues will be addressed by sidefx in h20.

I don't understand you guys, and your houdini crashes all the time for me.
Does your hardware meet the requirements/vendor supported hardware?
How many personal apps, etc and all manner of other things do you have installed?

And, how much of the crashing is to do with the way in which you are using it? Houdini
is open ended, and you can easily force a value that will fill your GPU, or load the CPU to hell
and back.

Do you have 3 different renderers installed(for what possible reason I have no idea)?

Those of us that use it 10-12 hours a day in Studios, for years, don't experience the same type of
"it's so unstable, blender doesn't do this" thing at all. And it comes down to hardware environments
and user input. Maybe spend some more time checking your hardware setup, and taking a good look at
your workflows.

L

Houdini is very stable software ,like nuke . If you are having crashes the reason is 99% your workflow/setup , always.Check your scene ,go up to your node setup and debug where and when it happens and fix it.
I assure you that 99% its you are doing something wrong.

Anyword if houdini 20 karma XPU will be also for amd or it will be just for nvidia exclusive?
please sidefx dont make people to married to nvidia !

lewis_T
I don't understand you guys, and your houdini crashes all the time for me.
Does your hardware meet the requirements/vendor supported hardware?
How many personal apps, etc and all manner of other things do you have installed?

And, how much of the crashing is to do with the way in which you are using it? Houdini
is open ended, and you can easily force a value that will fill your GPU, or load the CPU to hell
and back.

Do you have 3 different renderers installed(for what possible reason I have no idea)?

Those of us that use it 10-12 hours a day in Studios, for years, don't experience the same type of
"it's so unstable, blender doesn't do this" thing at all. And it comes down to hardware environments
and user input. Maybe spend some more time checking your hardware setup, and taking a good look at
your workflows.

L

I work a lot in Solaris now and I've found that is where most of the instability is for me (the UV tools in SOPS are also pretty unstable) I do when I disable redshift from the environment it performs better but until XPU is better redshift is all I got, so that might be more of a Maxon problem than a sidefx one, either way, I get regular crashes from Houdini. For people who don't get regular crashes could share specific environment setups. SideFx maybe can do a series on this. Proper package.json setups and so forth. I've followed the documentation but still, there could be something wrong on my end.

My hardware is:
Ryzen 3950x
64GB RAM
1x RTX 3090

mandrake0
It could be that there is a update or a change, what we know is that there will be a new Viewport based on Vulcan. it could be that the new Viewport will support all Contexts (sop, lop, cop, mat). (just a guess)
The main reason i would say was development Integration as with Solaris there was also Hydra for the viewport and when you want to mix it with other viewport OpenGL it is surly in the background not a simple task. When you know that you need to develop anyway a new Viewport you invest more time in to the new code.

Thanks i think it is a great resume.

I read many of you for your wish for H20. I also disagree like some of you about the need to solve stability, documentation or UI issue, actually i would have more the reverse opinion, at least it's not a priority at all in my opinion.

But i do like the idea the see evolution for a more modern solid realtime viewport render, vulcan to support all context, so could fast prototype a complex node's networks in one context, from modelling to shader, and could look at every step on my network with a proper render more advance than the current unreliable openGL. Blender with a smoother access to realtime render like Eeve and Python state manipulators is gaining attention, Sidefx need to react fast and not miss that move!

- I know sidefx is not a massive big team, but an effort to better organize, name and comment sidefx/labs node network, that's would be appreciated! Please

- It has been discussed and i would like to double this : Clarisse was (still is) such a powerful unique tool , if the new viewport could push in that direction, that will certainly be a killer combo. Nvidia is also a building something interesting...

We are on the biggest paradigm shift i have observed in +25 years on CGI where tools would be more an more GPU or assisted by a specific trained IA model. Sidefx need to embrace that move in a long run, anticipate... Sidefx has a good card to play here, could be a central versatile platform.

Expected evolution on Cop, less headache on Licensing issue, speedup the move toward python state, address some current limitation of PDG, "find by search" option for VEX preset ...

For game development, if you are not on Unreal, but on Unity or a custom engine, good luck with the Houdini Engine HDK... there is a real issue there at least for the client i work for lately, im not even sure where we are going here...A slow death? But a large number of people are concerned, isn't it?

vincent.

eikonoklastes

hMonkey
Vex reference overview and more specifically the strings section doesn’t account for atoi/f, itoa

It does though? Unless, you're expecting them to document every single string function in the Overview section?

hMonkey
...if you don’t know specifically about atoi/itoa it’s time consuming to find.
This is the first result for me:

Nope.