malexander

That's the correct way to do it if you want true parallelism. You can't render multiple GL ROPs within the same session simultaneously. You could use ROP dependencies to render frame 1 of GLrop A, frame 1 of GLrop B, frame 2 of A, frame 2 of B, etc, however this just interleaves the rendering in the same session. It doesn't render the frames at the same time.

If your laptop has Nahimic audio installed, try shutting it down before launching Houdini. It tries to install some 3D positional audio nonsense to OpenGL and that ends up destabilizing Houdini.

You can turn the Origin Axes off and then select Save as Default (highly recommend doing this in a fresh Houdini session) This setting can be saved to the hip file, but can't be saved as a preference. I don't think you can change the default setting for Export Relative. It's on by default for HDAs - absolute paths are a pain if you go to convert a network to an HDA.

You can press PageUp in the viewport to go to the first SOP (box1) and then Shift+PageDown to select the next sibling to the right (or Shift+PageUp for the left). If you have handles displayed, it'll show the handles for each one as you move. Is this what you're looking for?

It's also good to note that any high-core count processor (usually above 10) has memory bandwidth issues because of Non-uniform Memory Access (NUMA). The AMD 2990X is a bit of an extreme case of that, to be sure. But pretty much all CPUs with many cores will partition the cores into clusters with their own memory controller attached to their own bank of RAM. If a core requests bit of memory that's in the RAM bank attached to their core cluster's memory controller, all is good. If the memory is in another bank, it has to hop to another cluster's memory controller, adding a bit of latency to the request. Because of this, both Intel and AMD have redesigned their core interconnects to work around this, so at least there's no more than 1 hop involved. Another interesting thing about high-core CPUs is that the "uncore" parts of the CPU now actually use more power than a CPU core, and these are not easily shut down like cores are when power savings is activated. This includes stuff like the interconnect and the memory controllers. So the idle power of these monster CPUs is quite high. Just something to bear in mind.

So, 3D apps get harder as you spend time with them? I must be doing it wrong

And GLSL, which I ironically forgot as well

Also python 2.7, VEX, XML, and several proprietary scripts (ui, ds, cmd) in supporting roles.

Do you have a power supply that's in the 800W+ range? Usually if things are shutting down without warning it's a power supply issue.

Yep, that sounds like a race condition. Have you tried just setting the env variables in python (putenv)? When Houdini spawns MPlay, MPlay inherits all the environment variables that were set. Otherwise I suppose you could wait until the .flipbook_lock file appears, and then run the flipbook, as it's MPlay that creates the lockfile.

You can determine which mplay sessions Houdini is linked to for flipbooking and rendering by looking at $HOME/houdiniX.Y/.flipbook_lock.<hostname> and .mplay_lock.<hostname> (if they exist). The first number is the process ID of the connected mplay session.

Yes, 410 works.

It's being looked at. In the meantime, turn off SubD curves on the hairgen objects.

It's in the Optimization tab of the Display Options.

The shadow is the individual bounding boxes of the instances being culled. It looks like a solid blob because they're all overlapping. This is a feature that prevents instancing from generating a massive number of polygons to draw, which can slow your redraws down (and if you're on Windows, cause the driver to reset). You can tweak the Scene Polygon Limit to balance redraw speed with the # of instances actually drawn.