Clearing RAM after sim without restarting Houdini

[StepbyStepVFX]

Hi All,

I am playing around with Houdini trying to destroy a big monument (Arch of Triumph) with Bullet. The model is made of some 170 000 bricks modeled individually, not to mention the cracks I made that add some thousands of mid-size debris, and all of that maintained with more than 2 millions constraints.

After some expensive tests, it appears, of course, that it cannot be simulated one shot on my computer, as it breaks the 64Gb RAM I have available to me as soon I start to delete too many constraints and things start to collide in every directions.

So I have split the work into several simulations, in « cascade », to divide and conquer  : I start with the lower part of the monument, then I use the cached sim as an animated static object in the next simulation and so on.

Again, after some tests, I have that : the first sim is going well, but the second sim crashes after 16 frames, breaching the 64Gb of RAM.

BUT : when I trigger the first simulation, then close Houdini (RAM usage is cleared, I can see it on the ressources monitor of WIndows), open Houdini again and run the second sim, everything is fine.

So, because I am a lazy man that wants to automatize things at the maximum, I would like to be able to trigger the whole at once, without manually restarting Houdini and taking over the jobs where it stopped : how could I flush the memory completely from the « out » context, where I have my Fetch and Batch nodes (pointing to the various ROP Geometry after each of my successive DOP networks), and where I would like to flush the memory between each Batch and the next Fetch ?

By the way, is this behavior of Houdini « normal », or is it some memory leaks (intrinsic to the software and the way it was coded) ?

Thanks for your help !

PS : this topic has been very discussed in many places on the forum, but after having read several threads, I didn’t find any satisfaying answer...

Edited May 3, 2018 by StepbyStepVFX