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OSX El Capitan with Houdini (have anyone updated?)


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Yes - working fine on the test Mac Mini machine.

 

Edit: a nice addition to El Cap is the ability to hide the top menu bar - now we can have more screen real estate until Houdini can go full-screen. 

Edited by tar
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Also updated; working pretty good on my MacBook (GeForce 650m).

 

Another nice thing is that you can preview obj and alembic files in finder (and open them in Preview) :)

 

Yes - working fine on the test Mac Mini machine.

 

Edit: a nice addition to El Cap is the ability to hide the top menu bar - now we can have more screen real estate until Houdini can go full-screen. 

 

 

Fullscreen would be awesome. Was using Maya 2016 fullscreen in split screen mode; it was pretty nifty.

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I just upgraded my MacMini, while H14 does work, you can not enable materials in the viewport or you get a crash. Give it a try, enable all those fancy viewport effects then CTRL-Click on MocapBiped2. (crash-a-roony).

 

El Capitan also clobbered a couple of other legacy apps I had been using such as After Effects CS3 (dead el capitan) and MAndelbulber no longer works either.

 

So does Houdini H14 use OSX Metal yet, or is that still in development?

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So does Houdini H14 use OSX Metal yet, or is that still in development?

 

Where did you hear that it's in development? Metal is at version 1, shows no real-world performance and would be considered a bug-fix for Apple's openGL currently. Considering the amount of GLSL shaders Houdini uses you would want to develop for a stable Metal before hoping on a unstable v1 API IMO. 

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I thought there was scuttle but all over the net about developers giving up on OpenGL on OSX because Apple could not stabilize the driver for high-end software. I also personally received messages from SESI claiming that the problem with the Mac Mini was the OSX OpenGL drivers.

 

It makes sense that now that OSX is updated all the OSX OpenGL Houdini bugs should no longer be a problem...right?

 

Apple itself claims that OSX running Metal is 10X faster than previous version as of this version 1.

 

 

A Mac running Metal can draw objects on the screen up to ten times faster than without.
Edited by Atom
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Apple also claims it's Mac Pro is for professionals too... Apple almost without fail will not admit a fault with it's products or detail a bug list fix when they do happen. The situation is on OsX OpenGL has more bugs and less performance than on Windows or Linux. It has GL 4.1 support, which is ~5years old, and the claims that Apple have on Metal's performance will bring it up the level of OpenGL 4.5+ on Windows/Linux.  

 

Metal is a very similar idea to Vulcan and DX12, less driver overhead leaving the CPU free to do more stuff, yet Vulcan/DX12 will achieve even greater performance than OpenGL does now - which is the level that Apple claims Metal can get. This is not good for pros.

 

The 10X claim tested:

'Metal performance in OS X El Capitan: Sometimes great, often mixed [updated]'

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/10/metal-performance-in-os-x-el-capitan-sometimes-great-often-mixed/

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Honestly, I'd be happy just to see Houdini geometry displayed correctly on all Apple hardware platforms. No crashes, black geometry, garbage pixels, screen suddenly going into a vsync-flicker, beachball-inducing software fallbacks. Then we can talk about performance. I only have so much hair left on my head.

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Ya in the end I would prefer if OsX worked, it's just that with OpenCL CPU & GPU, better GL and bullet simulation performance Windows and Linux allows many more interactions and the work comes out better.

 

Will test El Cap on the OsX  with Nivida 980 once I know the web drivers are working fine.

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@malexander:

I found one of the culprits for OS X MacMINI viewport crashes on ElCapitan. It seems that IntelHD4000 does not support Anisotropic Filtering for textures. By default this seems to be on and causes Houdini H14 to crash when you enable Materials with textures in the viewport. By turning off the Anisotropic Filtering and saving that as a new viewport default I am able to see textures in my MacMINI viewport without crashing.

Edited by Atom
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@malexander:

I found one of the culprits for OS X MacMINI viewport crashes on ElCapitan. It seems that IntelHD4000 does not support Anisotropic Filtering for textures. By default this seems to be on and causes Houdini H14 to crash when you enable Materials with textures in the viewport. By turning off the Anisotropic Filtering and saving that as a new viewport default I am able to see textures in my MacMINI viewport without crashing.

 

Crazy times - the HD 3000 doesn't crash with Anisotropic Filtering turned on. Ahhh the wonders and consistancy of graphics drivers :) OsX 10.11 MacMini

Edited by tar
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There's some issues with rendering in El Cap. The Render View might not work and tries to launch an MPlay window, that will not render then. Edit: Rebooting with 'csrutil disable' seems to have fixed it. This disables the new CSI: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/documentation/Security/Conceptual/System_Integrity_Protection_Guide/ConfiguringSystemIntegrityProtection/ConfiguringSystemIntegrityProtection.html

 

H14.0.473, mac Mini, OsX 10.11  

Bug ID=71571

Edited by tar
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I have not had any problems with rendering using H14.474 yet. Overall I am glad I updated, now my  Mac is current and Houdini is working as well as it can as a non-supported MacMini. The loss of two legacy apps that I rarely use is not a show stopper for me.

post-12295-0-32451600-1444219909_thumb.p

Edited by Atom
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@malexander:

I found one of the culprits for OS X MacMINI viewport crashes on ElCapitan. It seems that IntelHD4000 does not support Anisotropic Filtering for textures. By default this seems to be on and causes Houdini H14 to crash when you enable Materials with textures in the viewport. By turning off the Anisotropic Filtering and saving that as a new viewport default I am able to see textures in my MacMINI viewport without crashing.

 

Good catch! Anisotropic filtering with the HD 4000 and Intel's own drivers on Windows work correctly, so it looks like this in another OSX driver bug. Very strange though, anisotropic filtering is a pretty old and standard technique.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Recently tested OsX 10.11.1 and H15.0.274 on Mac Pro with Nvidia.

 

I would highly recommend upgrading to it from OsX 10.10.x as many OsX specfic bugs are fixed.

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  • 2 weeks later...

i have also upgraded to H15 and elcapitan on a macbook pro(2014) or so and have found that it runs very smoothly.  The only issue i have is that when my laptop is not connected to a second screen, the icons on either side of the viewport and the shelves have become tiny.  So small in fact that its almost unusable, so i wrote to Sidefx and they replied mentioning that you can reduce or increase the size of the interface directly from the houdini.env file with the command  HOUDINI_UISCALE   by default, the scale is 100 but i increase this to 170 when using my laptop screen but put it back to default when i have a second screen attached.  Sidefx know about this and they working to fix it but this works well for now.  This is what my env file looks like

 

#
# Houdini Environment Settings
#
# The contents of this file are read into the environment
# at startup.  They will override any existing entries in
# the environment.
#
# The syntax is one entry per line as follows:
#    VAR = VALUE
#
# Values may be quoted
#    VAR = "VALUE"
#
# Values may be empty
#    VAR = 
#
 
# Example:
#
# HOUDINI_NO_SPLASH = 1
 
HOUDINI_UISCALE = 150
 
RMANTREE = /Applications/Pixar/RenderManProServer-20.3
PATH = /Applications/Pixar/RenderManProServer-20.3/bin:$PATH
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