Grant Miller

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About Me

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VFX Artist
INDUSTRY
Film/TV

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Houdini Academy Advisor
Since Jan 2024

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obj-image HIVE
Worldbuilding with USD at Ingenuity Studios

Recent Forum Posts

Husk.exe stuck not finishing task Jan. 17, 2024, 2:16 p.m.

We've gone back to rendering in Houdini 19.0 for now, which is an awful solve even short-term as the resolver format changed between the two versions so we're being forced to flatten scenes down before sending them to the farm.

It's definitely frustrating that multiple studios have flagged this for multiple renderers and yet no one seems to have any ideas.

Personally I feel like if the same RenderMan version stalling in 19.5 and not in 19.0 that puts the ball in SideFX court but ultimately we just need it fixed :\

No module named sidefx_stroke or kinefx.stateutils Nov. 28, 2023, 7:31 p.m.

Amazing tip, this has been such an annoyance, thank youuu!

The Right click > Properties > Start In path is %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% by default on our Windows install, it should be:

"C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 20.0.506\bin"

Husk.exe stuck not finishing task Nov. 28, 2023, 3:14 a.m.

We've spent the day debugging this to no avail unfortunately.

Tested:

  • fast exit = 0
  • rendering locally then copying to the network (Houdini consistently hates our SMB server)
  • reducing scene complexity / instance count
  • testing w/ several other scenes

There seems to be a loose correlation between the scene complexity and our chances of getting hung frames, with greater complexity giving a much greater chance. We reduced the instance count by half, and then to 20%, and went from most frames hanging to perhaps a third of the frames hanging.

We've also pulled in additional scenes to test, and are getting the same hanging in a simple high poly river scene that we're seeing in a scatter-heavy instance scene, but w/ less consistency, only hanging or slowing about 10% of the frames.

Some of our hung frames do eventually complete, often taking 4-20x longer than the original frames. Our best test case for this scenario has been the river scene, which is normally 2 minutes per frame, but consistently has several frames out of 100 taking 30+ minutes or never completing.

Progress on the hung frames often stalls out at 50-99%, with the logs simply stopping after that.

Apologies for the lengthy post, just trying to give as much info as we can to help solve this.

Windows 10 / Houdini 19.5.569 / RenderMan 25.2