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Why are macs very popular among Houdini users?


magneto

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Hi,

I can attest the vast majority of Houdini tutorials I have seen were recorded on macos. I can understand macbooks looking slicker than most other laptops, but Houdini seems the least stable on macos. I am saying based on what I read on the forums.

There is almost always a part in the tutorial when the instructor talks why he is having these stability and display issues :)

This is not a flaming thread though. I am just curious why people almost always prefer using them for Houdini, when it's known to be the most problematic platform for Houdini?

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Guest mantragora

Most of those guys are people that have nothing common with any realtime solutions, and probably also because of Apple<=>Pixar common history. Once you move outside of die hard movie world you will see less and less macs.

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I have a mac, works great and Houdini does too although it is true there are some issues related to the slightly weird OpenGL support in Houdini for mac but these are minor issues for me so I am more than happy.

regarding why use it for training, if you have tried to record video and audio on Linux, edit it, tweak the audio, add extra graphs... the answer is pretty obvious.

but may be I am wrong.

Hi,

I can attest the vast majority of Houdini tutorials I have seen were recorded on macos. I can understand macbooks looking slicker than most other laptops, but Houdini seems the least stable on macos. I am saying based on what I read on the forums.

There is almost always a part in the tutorial when the instructor talks why he is having these stability and display issues :)

This is not a flaming thread though. I am just curious why people almost always prefer using them for Houdini, when it's known to be the most problematic platform for Houdini?

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my guess would be that macs especially macbooks are popular among people overall, especially if you want lightweight portable elegant laptop and you don't care about the top performance

and even though most houdini artists/tds are using Linux in professional environment, they are usually recording tutorials in the free time on their laptops as for tutorial you don't need a workstation

so I would not say that them using mac for recording and best os for houdini is related in any way

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Good points. Current SESI tutorials from Ari are all recorded on OSX, and I remember many instances where he complains about the dislay issue that occured randomly. I don't remember if each instance was affecting only OSX or all platforms though.

Although OSX aside, I wish they used a workstation as some of these tutorials are very expensive and IMO it doesn't make sense to complain about hardware performance on video when they had the choice to use their workstation. These are not live classes that are recorded though, but even then you can do it on your workstation :)

Just my 2 cents regarding performance.

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Re: complaining about bugs. I think you're are seeing exactly what most users do when they encounter a bug... instead of methodically hammering out the bug and reporting it, they will comment on it, i.e. #&*Q(!!!, then move on.

The way the bugs are truly killed is to note the bug, then isolate it, then report it. It's does take effort but most uses don't, then come to the forums to whinge....

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Guest mantragora

The way the bugs are truly killed is to note the bug, then isolate it, then report it. It's does take effort but most uses don't, then come to the forums to whinge....

Stop whinging... ;)

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I agree with Marty. That happens a lot. I report a lot of bugs. But I swear even bugs I see in tutorials made years ago are still there in the latest release that I use and not reported, as SESI tells you otherwise that it's a known bug.

At least SESI fixes some of these after my reports, which makes me wonder why these people don't do the same so that by the time other people get to watch it, the issue would already be gone.

If only I had a dollar for every bug I submit :)

Facebook offers $100K for every bug from what I read. Maybe SESI would allow you to use your bug reports as tokens in the SESI boutique store that opened recently :)

Edited by magneto
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Unfortunately with the realities of production, when you encounter obscure bugs and whatnot you either a.) can't easily reproduce without your pipeline setup, or b.) don't have the time to figure out what is wrong and just work around it.

I would also agree with Tomas about many people just owning some sort of Mac. I was one of the very first people to test Houdini on OSX however that was largely due to the fact that I was currently using a MBP as my main computer at home. Unfortunately the overall Mac experience wasn't something I cared for so it's long gone.

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good point graham - then it's a catch 22 situation where production can't post confidential info on the forums where some of the best bug hunters are. What is the solution?

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There really isn't one. We have a few people who can usually spend some time investigating our peoples major issues (Jason and I) but as with anything the hard ones are the barely reproducible ones. Most artists who encounter non-crashing bugs can always choose to submit an issue with our internal tracker but will generally not bother and work around the issue (crashes usually get flagged most of the time).

It's also not just about confidential information but just basic technology or hardware config setups that we might have. We submit bugs to SESI all the time that they can't reproduce but we can on our end 100% of the time. We've more than happy to upload models, otls, scripts or whatever we can to help them figure it out but when you have so many things relying on other things that you just can't send (compiled libraries, random pipeline Python modues, etc) there's not much you can do other than to spend a long time stripping away the layers in the hopes you can get something you can send them. We still do this all the time with decent success, but with our depleted manpower there's no guarantee issues will ever get submitted.

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We have had a few, and yes we have reported them with examples and everything… frustrating as so many distributions, combinations of OS, drivers and libraries sure can't make the developers happy. This is one of the reasons I love Macs, there are very stable platforms to develop as it is just one flavour of the OS, a few models and all of them are kept in sync on every iteration.

It is funny though that the Mac OpenGL usage in Houdini is not the best I have seen… somethings work better, other worst than the linux box at work so strange… hope on the next realeas they tidy up their OpenGL and viewport… the user experience will gain A LOT.

Is anyone else having massive OpenGL issues in 12.5/linux? It's driving me nuts...

In relation to this topic, my 2007 MacbookPro runs Houdini fine if I ever have to do quick stuff at home.

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As a Mac user, I would buy/build a dedicated Linux machine for Houdini if there was some significant performance advantage but I'm not sure how to benchmark / evaluate that dogfight. I've always assumed that buying a lot machines, the studios just wanted the cheap boxes and free OS a Linux box gets you? Is anyone aware of a spec sheet or comparisons for state of the art, blindingly-fast Linux or Mac boxes? I'm assuming the new Mac Pros win on that for the Mac side but I'm not a tech or Linux user.

Personally, I would appreciate it if SideFx published hell-raiser specs in addition to the minimum required specs. I'd save up and put that together.

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As a Mac user, I would buy/build a dedicated Linux machine for Houdini if there was some significant performance advantage but I'm not sure how to benchmark / evaluate that dogfight. I've always assumed that buying a lot machines, the studios just wanted the cheap boxes and free OS a Linux box gets you? Is anyone aware of a spec sheet or comparisons for state of the art, blindingly-fast Linux or Mac boxes? I'm assuming the new Mac Pros win on that for the Mac side but I'm not a tech or Linux user.

Personally, I would appreciate it if SideFx published hell-raiser specs in addition to the minimum required specs. I'd save up and put that together.

Best to run the test yourself, just install Linux on your Mac and see the difference, on the same hardware. You get better memory management for simulations, better OpenGL 3+, and generally faster overall performance. I would say approx. 30% better in general and even faster when using openCL Cpu/Gpu. 2x-10x faster simulation speed. You can boot into a Linux installation with Refind: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

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