all geometry suddenly appear transparent in the viewport?!

[Baldric]

Hello everyone,

 

I have an incredibly annoying problem in a scene of mine. I have been working on a scene, expanding a bit on a cmivfx tutorial. Suddenly, in the latest version of my scene all geometry seems to be transparent in the viewport. Everything was working fine in the previous version numbers, and I cannot see what I could have changed for this problem to occur. I've been working with an obj model of mine, but also when I create native geometry the problem is the same.

It is a viewport issue only I think, because if I render the scene everything seems fine. That is, I then see the geometry as it should correctly display. Also, when I just open an empty scene geometries display correctly.

 

Does anyone have any genereal idea as to what can cause this? Unfortunately I cannot share the assets and cache files...

Is there some kind of bug I should know about?

 

Thanks,

 

Doug

 

 

[malexander]

Try increasing the OpenGL cache size in Windows > Cache Manager. It defaults to 2GB, but your scene may be larger than that, causing some undesirable cache pruning behaviour.

[Baldric]

Hello Illusionist,

 

thanks for the tip, but when I look in the cache manager I can see that the cache is much smaller than the max size, so that does not help. Good to know where to find the manager though. Had been looking for the place where I can manually delete the caches I need to :-) 

 

Any other possibilities to solve my problem?

 

Thanks,

 

Doug

[Guest tar]

Which version are you using on which platform? There was an issue with CopySop on OsX about a year ago where objects would be come ghosted. Haven't seen that in the latest versions.

[Baldric]

Thanks for your reply marty,

 

I am currently using the version 13.0.392 (apprentice) on windows... So I guess that does not really cover the problem either?

 

Cheers

 

Doug

[magneto]

I have the same problem in shaded mode. Is it because of recently released nvidia drivers?

[Guest tar]

without any screenshots or .hip files, it's worth downgrading to older drivers and running for a few days.

[magneto]

I don't know if the problem is limited to open polygons but for example when I create a polygon grid and carve it from 0 to 1, this is what I see in both shaded and wireframe views:

 

[Georgie]

I updated my drivers to 344.11 yesterday and I'm also having some issues. Might be just me but deselecting the geometry in the network view (so that it's not highlighted) fixes it. 

 

http://i.imgur.com/ppoly8q.jpg - deselected in smooth shaded mode

http://i.imgur.com/OrmlR1I.jpg - selected in smooth shaded mode

http://i.imgur.com/ODcSdra.jpg - selected in wireframe mode

Edited September 23, 2014 by Georgie

[malexander]

You can try setting the environment variable HOUDINI_OGL_DUMP_SHADER_ERRORS to 1 to see if some shaders are failing to compile. A failed shader will not draw anything when draw calls are issued with it active.

 

Nvidia (and AMD, Intel) provide the GLSL compiler, so it's possible that results can change over time. It's also not unheard of to see compiler bugs sneak in.

[magneto]

Thanks Mark, I just did it and got this error as soon as I placed a carve node after a Grid node:

  1:  #version 150
  2:  
  3:  
  1:  #line 1
  2:  
  3:  layout(lines_adjacency) in;
  4:  layout(line_strip, max_vertices = 2) out;
  5:  
  6:  in vec4  lcolor[];
  7:  in float lselected[];
  8:  
  9:  out vec4 color;
 10:  out float selected;
 11:  
 12:  uniform int	       glH_SelectMode;
 13:  
 14:  int  HOUprimitiveInfo(out ivec3 vertex);
 15:  bool HOUprimSelection();
 16:  
 17:  void main()
 18:  {
 19:      bool select;
 20:      ivec3 vertex;
 21:      bool prim_selected;
 22:  
 23:      prim_selected = HOUprimSelection();
 24:      
 25:      color = lcolor[1];
 26:      selected = prim_selected ? 1.0 : lselected[1];
 27:      gl_Position = gl_in[1].gl_Position;
 28:      gl_ClipDistance[0] = gl_in[0].gl_ClipDistance[0];
 29:      gl_ClipDistance[1] = gl_in[0].gl_ClipDistance[1];
 30:      EmitVertex();
 31:  
 32:      color = lcolor[2];
 33:      selected = prim_selected ? 1.0 : lselected[2];
 34:      gl_Position = gl_in[2].gl_Position;
 35:      gl_ClipDistance[0] = gl_in[1].gl_ClipDistance[0];
 36:      gl_ClipDistance[1] = gl_in[1].gl_ClipDistance[1];
 37:      EmitVertex();
 38:  
 39:      EndPrimitive();
 40:  }
Geometry shader compile[beauty_line_wire.geom]:
0(28) : error C7531: global variable gl_ClipDistance requires "#extension GL_ARB_compatibility : enable" before use

[malexander]

Thank you! Looks like an Nvidia GLSL compiler bug. gl_ClipVertex requires the compatibility profile, gl_ClipDistance does not. I will send them an email...

 

If you're feeling adventurous, you can add this line directly after #version 150:  #extension GL_ARB_compatibility : enable 

[magneto]

Thanks Mark, I am feeling adventurous but I don't know where the shader file is located

[malexander]

It's in $HFS/houdini/glsl/material/GL32

[magneto]

Thanks Mark, I did it but same result except I don't get an error message printed in the console. Do I have to compile the shader myself?

[malexander]

Nope, Houdini compiles the shaders for you. I guess the issue is a little deeper than just getting it to compile.

[magneto]

Thanks Mark, so Nvidia has to fix this issue, right?

[eetu]

I just got a new machine and I've run into this as well. I haven't got a coherent feel of it yet, but seems like the selected geometry especially seems to vanish.

 

Win7/64bit, VC11, GeForce 760, newest drivers.

[magneto]

Eetu, what kind of machine did you get? Is that a beast, seeing you are a particle master?

[eetu]

Heh, just a sensible bang/buck machine for game dev, nothing to write home about

 

I had some UI problems with other software as well, switched between a few driver versions, and now I really can't remember what problems I had with which.. But the newest were not kosher with Houdini, that I remember.