On a side note, I would like to thank SideFX for incorporating this wonderful physics solver into their program…

Pros:

Cuts render times into mere slivers of what it would take with RBD
Works well and produces far superior results with less penetration errors
many more…

Cons:

Does not seem to work with 20000+ objects, Always causing houdini to crash

As stated above, the ODE physics option is great, however it does not seem willing to work with an object count over 10-20000. Note that I am using the most update version of Houdini (daily build as of February 14-12th-ish) and am using the following computer:

MacBook Pro Late 2009
NVIDIA 9400M/9600MGT (9600MGT primarily)
3.06Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor (Intel)
500GB 7200 RPM HDD
4GB DDR3 RAM
OSX 10.6.2

If anyone has any solutions to this problem, or are aware of any makeshift patches that can be made at the present time, please let me know.

Ho boy, this is gonna be a fun topic.

First off, what are you siming that requires 20,000 objects? 10,000 alone is pretty high, specially for DOPs, ODE or not.

I suggest looking at some sort of work around, specially working in layers.

As for the ODE dop, it's a good step forward, though I would prefer a SESI supported Bullet DOP, since I think Bullet has a better feature set and a better future than ODE.

It looks like it's still missing a few features, but it looks like a few of them can be built from inside Houdini, but haven't had enough time to look into it.

What I was trying to replicate was the domino video located somewhere on this site…demoing the ODE DOP option…wether or not this was done on a Windows based or Unix version of Houdini or not is beyond me (I am assuming of course the sim may have worked on a Win based version of Houdini), but as stated before, ODE doesn't work with an object count of 10000+. It was just to show a buddy of mine the power of ODE, however it just merely illustrated it's unfortunate limitations…sim still worked with RBD, but OMG, it causes SO MANY penetration errors, I nearly wanted to puke…

On a side note, it was not 10000 individual objects, what it was was 1 RB object, with a # of copies set to 10000 and for the x position ($OBJ*1.1) this created the 10000 objects I wanted, and when I tried to simulate (having created a ball that hits the first domino like object beforehand) Houdini had a fatal error