Stephen Davidson

Oops, forgot to mention a couple more things I’ve tried:

I’ve also experimented with opening the Network View in List Mode, filtering for “groombear” to show all GroomBear nodes, selecting them, and locking them all at once. My hope was that locking would stabilize the caches. However, I’ve run into issues here too:

Houdini often crashes when I try to unlock or delete these locked nodes.
Even worse, I’ve noticed guides disappearing after unlocking a GroomBear node.
Has anyone else tried locking nodes as a workaround, or run into these crash/guide-loss issues? Any thoughts would be appreciated!

and A another issue is that the list mode is also unreliable as you have to turn it off and on in order to refresh it.

Hello everyone,

I’ve been wrestling with a persistent issue that I think began in Houdini 20.5 and persists in my current version, 20.5.522. Automatic file caching seems unreliable, particularly when working with hair guides.

Here’s my workflow: I groom guide curves, save the file, close Houdini, reopen it, and continue grooming as needed. Later, when I revisit previously worked-on sections, they’re often empty. The only fix I’ve found is to dig through older save files—sometimes going back tens of increments—to recover the guides. This is a huge time sink.

I primarily use GroomBear, but I don’t think it’s the culprit. GroomBear is just an HDA wrapping a file cache node, with a default caching expression: "$HIP/groom_cache/chs("tool_cache_prefix")_$HIPNAME_$OS_$F4.bgeo.sc". This setup seems solid and should work fine. That said, I’ve also seen the same issue crop up with Houdini’s native Guide Groom nodes, pointing to a broader file caching problem.

Some details on my setup and troubleshooting:

I’m unsure if “Increment on File Save” (currently enabled) is contributing to this.
I’ve disabled the Vulkan viewport, as some have suggested, with no improvement.
I’ve tested this on both PC and Linux—same result.
My current workaround is to manually cache every GroomBear node with a file cache node and load the files by hand. With multiple nodes, though, this is tedious and still unreliable since I’m constantly double-checking them.

Has anyone else run into similar problems with automatic file caching in Houdini—not just with hair grooming, but in general? If you’ve found a solution or a better workaround, I’d love to hear it. This has been a major workflow bottleneck for me.

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Cheers,

Steve

Are we customers paying to beta test Houdini 20.5?