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Houdini viewport glitches and bugs


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Hello everybody,

I became tired of dealing with various viewport bugs in Houdini, still hoping it will go away one day. On the other hand, I guess even Houdini has to have something that totally and completely sucks :) 

Anyways, my biggest issue is with displaying textures. Sometimes I am unable to display any textures unless I restart Houdini. Other times, textures are sort of displaying but are not updating - I mean if I assign a material to an object, there's no guarantee it will actually display in the viewport. And then it pops up 5 mins later when I'm doing something else. Closing and opening a new viewport only helps sometimes. 

There is bunch of buttons that promise updating viewport materials and textures but they seem to do nothing.

This is SUPER annoying and I'm looking for some workarounds (if there are any at all - I'm trying to figure this out for years with no success).

Thanks for any suggestions.

cheers.

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Hey David,

Yes, the frustration is real!  I experienced a *lot* of annoying display issues working at studios that used CentOS Linux when I didn't experience the same issues at other studios running Win10 or a different Linux OS. I also didn't experience those the same issues using Ubuntu or Win10 at home, so some operating systems seem more prone to issues than others.

Updating drivers would sometimes help, as would adjusting the Display-> Geometry/Texture/Optimize settings, not to mention clearing caches out via the Cache Manager window.  That seemed to help a little bit.  However, there were many times I had to close viewport display panels and create new ones in order to clear out display bugs (ex: displayed geometry that wouldn't go away) and it wasn't just me - other users around me would see the same issues.  Once in awhile, yes, I would have to just close Houdini and open a new session to get things to behave.

It is definitely frustrating to encounter, but unless we were ever able to give steps on reliably reproducing the issue (we weren't), then couldn't really submit the issues to SideFX as a bug.  I expect their advice for such issues would be the same steps I outlined above (and of course having a machine with lots of RAM, high-end Graphics card and processor, of course), but it couldn't hurt to post this query on the SideFX Forums for discussion where they would see it, either.

TLDR; No "silver bullet" solution for display issues, but you are not alone, my friend! :)

 

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I don't think Linux distribution has anything to do with that. More likely it's hardware <--> drivers <--> Houdini interoperability. It's really pointless to compare studio's computer on CentOS with private's Win10 - unless they have exactly the same hardware and deal with the same files! (which as rarely the case)

It's more likely, that your gtx 2080ti with recent drivers on Windows 10 works well with specific Houdini build viewport code while displaying not so many textures in test scenes, while studio computer floated with 8K/32bit textures fails miserably after Nvidia driver refuses to allocate buffer due to lack of VRAM, due to chrome's youtube allocating more VRAM, due to switching to higher resolution etc etc, and Houdini can't do anything other than NOT display texture. 

Aside of that, yes, glitches are annoying. Best way to deal with that is report a bug with as many specifics as possible. 

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Having lived with this for years (for me since Houdini 12.5), I have recently begun to wonder if it is a viewport bug at all? It is definitely related to the display flag. I wonder if the geo/dop(guide) object gets stuck in memory, or the flag toggle gets inverted? Most of the times, deleting the entire scene view and creating a new one will fix it, but I have seen the bug persist even after trying that solution. Restart always seems to fix it until it appears again.
I am less inclined to think it is drivers because I have experienced the same type of viewport error on different machines running different operating systems using different graphics hardware.

Edited by Atom
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  • 10 months later...

In my case, the viewport bug happened after a poly extrude node and I thing it was because of a point was shooting off to infinity somewhere and that drove the viewport crazy.  So it is not a driver issue, at least for me right now.  It appears to have something to do with the clipping plane of the camera.

Edited by cushwa
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  • 2 years later...

I think there is a new and exiting related bug in H20.

Null node seems to get stuck, so the network flow up to the null is displayed correctly, but the null itself shows a previous state.

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