VNC and houdini on LINUX

[vfxmorley]

Hi All.

Wondering if anyone is remotely using houdini on LINUX over VNC.

Im using OSX at home and have tried "Jolly VNC" and "chicken of the VNC" and am having issues with both.

The issues seems to be directly related to houdini in the way it redraws (or lack thereof in my case). Everything else eg. terminal, other apps all work fine in redrawing the screen as good as realtime, it just seems that after ever click or move of a node/window/anything in houdini the connection requires me to "refresh" the screen via the local VNC software to see the update in houdini

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

So you know before you ask, Im not working this way, just loggin in from home, checking sims, setting stuff off etc....

thanks

dave

[graham]

Houdini is rendered entirely using OpenGL and most, if not all VNC clients don't have adequate GL abilities to handle it. Some work better than others but none really great.

[sam.h]

I think this works fairly well for houdini:

http://www.nomachine.com/download.php

[vfxmorley]

thanks, ill give nomachine a go

[rutra]

Hi,

I'm trying to run Houdini on Linux over VNC as well but having same "redraw" issues.

So I've tried to set HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE = 1 but that didn't help. Then I found out that software OGL works only on Windows.

Is there any other way to force Houdini to use sofware OGL on Linux?

Unfortunately we can't use NoMachine NX (not even sure if it makes any difference)

Thanks

[anim]

I have very good experience with TeamViewer

it supports Linux, but I have used it only on OSX, Win and iPhone

There were no OGL problems, maybe it's worth a try

[Jason]

We use NoMachine NX at work, which works excellently with most apps. It's not quite a VNC client, it sends X events instead of pieces of the screen raster. It can struggle with Houdini sometimes because Houdini has to run under MesaGL software emulation and Houdini is getting more and more reliant on taking advantage of later OGL features, but it might be worth checking out.

[lukeiamyourfather]

Use x11vnc server with the -noxdamage option on the host. This should allow you to see anything OpenGL, including the Houdini viewport.

[Jason]

Use x11vnc server with the -noxdamage option on the host. This should allow you to see anything OpenGL, including the Houdini viewport.

Does this suffer the same malady as NX? ie; does it cause OpenGL to be rendered in software? Or does it still render in hardware but send raster data down?

[lukeiamyourfather]

Does this suffer the same malady as NX? ie; does it cause OpenGL to be rendered in software? Or does it still render in hardware but send raster data down?

I'm not a developer but I think it will still render with OpenGL on the graphics card. I've worked with millions of polygons and particles over VNC with no discernible difference in performance. It basically forces the entire screen to update constantly instead of just regions. This requires more bandwidth (since everything is being sent) but it does work. More on X Damage here (which isolates changing regions, hence -noxdamage).

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/XDamage

[lukeiamyourfather]

Last I used it was Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, I assume the arguments are still the same.

x11vnc -noxdamage -nowf -nowcr -noscr -nonap -nowait_bog -wait 5 -defer 1

When you exit the command it will exit the VNC server. They have options for security and credentials but I didn't need it at the time.

[Jason]

Our system engineers have found this: http://www.virtualgl.org/

On my initial tests it seems to work well -- not the fastest but it'll allow some simple maintenance of scenes and allow artists to launch renders, etc. I wouldn't think you could use if for interactive FX work at all.

[lukeiamyourfather]

Our system engineers have found this: http://www.virtualgl.org/

On my initial tests it seems to work well -- not the fastest but it'll allow some simple maintenance of scenes and allow artists to launch renders, etc. I wouldn't think you could use if for interactive FX work at all.

That looks like a promising project. Did you try x11vnc with -noxdamage?

Edited June 28, 2011 by lukeiamyourfather

[rutra]

We've tested it with NoMachine NX and VirtualGL + TurboVNC. No redraw issues with either virtualizations. TurboVNC is by far faster. Depending on your connection, TurboVNC can be as good as real-time. I've been connecting over ADSL and NX is great for basic 2D and TurboVNC+VirtualGL for 3D (Houdini). NX with virtualGL has some performance gain as well but not as noticeable.