Please - When? I need to switch from 2018 - engine is only think preventing me right now.

The houdiniEngine plugin is not stable with 2019 gold, due to problems on the Maya side. We're still waiting on a fix to MAYA-96541, which should be available in 2019 update1.

juliap
The houdiniEngine plugin is not stable with 2019 gold, due to problems on the Maya side. We're still waiting on a fix to MAYA-96541, which should be available in 2019 update1.

Thx for the info. I hope they will hurry up.

The houdiniEngine plugin for 2019 is now available in 17.0.590 and in 17.5.265.

Note that you still require either 2019.0.1 or 2019.1 (which should be available soon) in order to use the plugin. Due to a dependency graph bug in the original 2019 release, the houdiniEngine plugin is unstable and will reliably crash/hang in that release of 2019.

Please let us know if you encounter any new crashes with assets that worked reliably in 2018 and earlier.

After some more extensive testing with 2019.0.1 and some of the new Evaluation Manager settings, here are a few things to note:

1. Your Cached Playback and Idle Action settings can combine with AutoSync Outputs to get into an infinite AutoSync loop running in the background on idle. Unfortunately, this can happen with the default settings:

If you're in Evaluation Manager Serial or Parallel mode,
and Cached Playback is on and CacheFill is set to Background in your preferences
and Idle Action is set to IdleRebuildAndPrepareForManip in the Advanced tab in the Modes section of the Evaluation Toolkit window

… AND you have animation on your parms that would trigger autosync, as soon as the time changes and autosync is triggered once, the backgound loop starts up. (This is because autoSync executes on idle, so during normal playback, even if autoSync is requested, it doesn't get triggered until playback ends, and it only autoSyncs once because we're careful to not queue up multiple autosyncs. But if cacheFill also happens per-frame on idle - then an autoSync can happen immediately after the frame that triggers it, invalidate the playback cache and start it filling all over again)

If you see the playback cache display partially completing and then restarting over and over again, this may be what's happening. Once it's in this state, it's also more likely to crash, especially if there are multiple assets in the scene.

The easiest way to work around this for now is to set Cached Playback to only CacheFill during playback. However once you've gotten into the loop on idle state, you may need to save your prefs and restart Maya to make sure that it's in a good state.

Even if you're not hitting problem 1, you may want to avoid background cache fill if your cook is expensive and you have multiple assents in the scene.

2. If you're in Evaluation Manager Serial or Parallel mode, the evaluation manager is now used for some interactive manipulation as well, if Manipulation is turned on in the Advanced tab in the Modes section of the Evaluation Toolkit window.

Unfortunately, this is resulting in parms not being updated from their attributes when using a slider or micro-slider, and then the attributes and parm values are in an inconsistent state, until you sync (or at least sync the attributes)

The easiest way to work around this for now is to turn off Manipulation in the Evaluation Manager.

I will post when there is a fix for either of these issues (or if the behavior changes in 2019.1 or later updates)

The problem with attributes not updating the parms on mouse move when InteractiveManipulation is on for the Evaluation Manager is fixed in 17.5.301. Note that the fix involves making the parm attributes internalSet. Since those are dynamic attributes, if you have existing scenes you will need to re-sync the assetNode (or at least re-sync the attributes) in order to be able to take advantage of this fix.

If you're trying this out and notice anything off with the way that parm Attributes are being applied to the parms, please let us know..

juliap
The problem with attributes not updating the parms on mouse move when InteractiveManipulation is on for the Evaluation Manager is fixed in 17.5.301. Note that the fix involves making the parm attributes internalSet. Since those are dynamic attributes, if you have existing scenes you will need to re-sync the assetNode (or at least re-sync the attributes) in order to be able to take advantage of this fix.

If you're trying this out and notice anything off with the way that parm Attributes are being applied to the parms, please let us know..

Hi and thank you so much for all this info until now! It was very helpful to get informed about the state of houdini engine.
Now i've just swicthed for Maya 2019.1 and instaled the lastest daily build and it works!