Solutions for a corrupted hip file

[Neon Junkyard]

I had a somewhat crash-y .hip file, and now houdini hard crashes every time I open it, the error I'm getting on the console is 2724: fatal error: segmentation fault. running windows 7 pro

I read through the forums and someone suggested backing up all your prefs and trashing the houdini15.xx folder in the $HOME directory, in users\USER\documents\ which worked;  then I copied all my nodes over to a fresh scene (thats what I usually do in maya to fix this type of issue) and that has worked in the past but now it is crashing again. So it is something in the prefs

The issue is that I am not nearly as familiar with the prefs in houdini as maya and I have an uncountable amount of presets, permanant defaults for almost every node, tons of hotkeys, custom shelves, galleries, toolsets, custom HDA's, custom python menus you name it.  I know a lot of this is stored in the houdini install directory but does anyone have any insight as to what preferences might be the most likely culprit and how to restore the ones I need? I'm not really sure what each file does

I can't go back versions either, they are all now corrupted, so it makes sense that it would be something buried in the preferences I just have way too much stuff to just trash them all

Thanks guys

[Neon Junkyard]

To add to this I opened the scene on another computer with a different local install setup, still crashed, but trashing the preferences worked. However doing that exact same process on my main workstation does not work, still a hard crash even with fresh preferences

Also I installed the latest daily build and my graphics card drivers are up to date

Edited September 22, 2016 by Neon Junkyard

[Andy58]

Have you tried opening the scene via the command line using houdini -n /path/to/scene.hip?

Using -n opens the scene with Auto Update off and sometimes helps getting rid of rogue nodes.

Hope this helps,

Andy

 

[michael]

opening the scene with -n is a great tip

if you can't get this sorted please send the scene (and any external files it uses) to support. These kinds of issues are always hard to track down so having an example really help us out in fixing bugs etc

[Neon Junkyard]

Thanks for the tip about manual update, I will definitely keep that in my back pocket

I was able to get the scene stable by watching what the command line was doing when it crashed, and as I was able to open it on another computer with a fresh houdini install I locked a file cache node downstream from the problematic nodes and now it is relatively stable

Unfortunately I can't post the file as it contains copyrighted material and whatnot, plus knowing life it probably wouldnt be reproducible on the other end hah.  I was just wondering if anyone know for instance, like don't alter the build it HDA's and save them over the original or something.  I know so many ways to fix a maya scene like optimize scene size, python node clean scripts, flush bad geo through zbrush etc. To me it seems houdini doesn't have any tricks like this, just the preferences get corrupted and you have to start over, which is annoying

[Neon Junkyard]

Hey just wanted to point out, not sure if this is a new feature in one of the daily builds but if you load a blank scene in houdini and set it to manual then open your file it will automatically open it in manual mode, no need to fuss with command line

[Farmfield]

Another tip for scene files instantly crashing Houdini is, opening Houdini, disabling simulations, then opening the file - most issues I've had with this has been some sim crashing Houdini on frame 1.

[symek]

10 hours ago, Neon Junkyard said:

 (...)I know so many ways to fix a maya scene like optimize scene size, python node clean scripts, flush bad geo through zbrush etc. To me it seems houdini doesn't have any tricks like this, just the preferences get corrupted and you have to start over, which is annoying

This is perhaps because corruption of maya's scenes happens so often...?  

Houdini hip file is as a cpio archive which can be opened with hexpand  command or any other archviser like 7-zip. You can edit it with text editor and collapse it again into hip file. It happened to me maybe twice in 12 years that I had to do this. 

[Dusmus]

Symek I don't know if you'll ever read this but I saw your message at 3AM after spending all day trying to fix a corrupted hip file (probably because of octane). Was able to expand the scene, identify the corrupted parts, replace them with healthy ones and collapse it back to a hip file. Saved my life working like a charm so THANKS MATE  

[symek]

oh, I read a lot  Thank you.