Hey

I've been playing with houdini engine (indie) in 3dsmax 2019 for about half an hour and have found several bugs, most are related to a specific .hda I've built but I've tried to also test against the supplied demos where applicable or a basic example. New ones I continue to find I'll keep listing in the thread but the first ones are.

1. A mesh without UV's will insta crash max - the most basic copy to points hda will do this for me in both create object mode and modifier HDA mode

2. a max modifier stack will not be respected on recook - it looks like the current stack selection is used rather than top level. therefore if your UV's are at the top of the stack and you're doing things like moving splines at the bottom of your stack when you go to recook them it wont find UV's and will crash. Also preferred behaviour for me would be to cook the result of the entire stack not just what is displaying in the max viewport (show end result toggle can avoid this but not always on) not usually a problem if you use Modifier HDA mode only create object mode

3. Various rotation issues, mostly linked to which active view the Create object dummy is created in and its offset of axis compared to objects created in other viewspoints…. i.e. if you create a dummy in perspective its up axis is different than if you created it from an ortho view.

Thats all fro first pass

Hi Dave,

1. Which build of Houdini are you using? The UV related crash was fixed and shouldn't be happening in any of the recent daily builds.

2. I will log a bug for this item. I agree that it should be recooking using the result of the top level modifier.

3. Do you have an example of this problem that I can take a look at?

- Brandon

Hey Brandon

1. using Houdini version 17.0352 - I'll try a new daily build today

3. steps to repro - note rotations aren't broken just the parent level dummy can have a different world rotation on build than expected

1. put focus in left view
   
2. use shelf tools to create Surface Instancer
   
3. choose your inputs
   
4. inspect local axis of parent dummy compared to instance surface Y will be up instead of Z because left view was active on creation.
   
5. fix is to zero rotations. might be more desirable for the dummy creation to be forced to create with rotations zeroed
   

Ah, I see now regarding #3. I will log a bug for this.

Thank you!

BrandonA
Ah, I see now regarding #3. I will log a bug for this.

Thank you!

Thank you guys for developing this plugin. I've been waiting a while for this to help us being able to introduce some houdini into our pipeline. As 20 year max users with projects that might have tail that is active for years its hard to jump ship completely in one go so to have ways to slowly introduce houdini so that it works with what we are doing and can develop over time is great.

So just to check it looks like if your HDA outputs packed instances then inside max it will create instanced individual geo. This is super nice and solves one of my R&D tasks which would be how to solve replacing basic geo with other object class (i.e. helpers, vrayproxies and other things not able to be sent to houdini engine)I can just have basic geo that I replace ps

I'm currently on the hunt for a way to pass bezier spline data(not nurbs)to houdini engine

Next bug

1. Max will insta crash if you select(via the node input) an unsuported type, i.e a spline, dummy basically non mesh objects. Probably needs a check for classes it can accept.

Had a houdini crash with this error

File: c:\houdini_tools\windows-x86_64-cl19.15\3dsmax\3dsmax-2019-0\custom\include\tab.h
Line: 360
Function: Tab<class MaxSDK::VertexNormal *>:perator
Expression: th && i < th->count

It seems to be consistent with showing the modifier stack results while creating geometry the HDA modifer cant deal with. I have a HDA which basically take in polygon shapes and does POlyexpand2d inside a for each loop for each polygon island. (polyexpand is set to Warn and output empty geometry)

My Max modifer stack is a set of spline shapes with an edit poly on top. if the geometry is all good it works fine. If I go into the editable spline and cause a broken piece of geo by breaking a point while seeing up the stack it crashes houdini and then Max. If I'm not seeing the stack end results it seems to be able to handle it.

Bezier curves: this is on the todo list for plugin features.

Max will insta crash if you select(via the node input) an unsuported type, i.e a spline, dummy basically non mesh objects. Probably needs a check for classes it can accept.

I will investigate this further, and I have submitted a bug for it.

Had a houdini crash with this error

File: c:\houdini_tools\windows-x86_64-cl19.15\3dsmax\3dsmax-2019-0\custom\include\tab.h
Line: 360
Function: Tab<class MaxSDK::VertexNormal *>:perator
Expression: th && i < th->count

Can you submit a bug to support with the error log and any other info so that I can investigate this particular crash further?

Thank you for reporting these issues!

BrandonA
Can you submit a bug to support with the error log and any other info so that I can investigate this particular crash further?

Thank you for reporting these issues!

Can do. As I'm stepping through this I am coming up with a list of questions that I'll try to post in here as well.

Hmmmm…. fixed a “different” problem more related to max meshes and now I'm not getting that particular crash. will hold of until I can get it to happen again.

Regarding the issues with the dummy object rotations, I'm not sure this is a bug. This seems to be consistent with how 3ds Max behaves by default. If I create any of the standard primitives, their local axes will be different depending on the viewport that the object is created in. Changing this would involve overriding the default behaviour of 3ds Max, which I'm not sure that we should do.