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Suddenly Houdini 17.5 doesn't start anymore on my Windows machine if the Octane path is in the env file. The splash screen shortly appears and then nothing. It used to work fine. I have tried many things, but am unable to fix it. I have tried various builds of Houdini and the plugin, but the problem remains? Where is the Octane plugin error log located? What to do? It is for the 4.04 plugin. Please advise, thanks.

N.B. If I remove the Octane plugin from the env file, Houdini starts without problem, but of course no Octane.

Hi,

Can you please attach your houdini.env file? It is really weird that you don't get at least an error message window or in the console.

Another thing that you can try is to delete your Houdini $HOME folder (usually at your Documents/houdini17.5 directory, where you have the houdini.env file) to fully clean your Houdini configuration.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

Hi Juanjo,

Thank you for your quick reply. I have fixed it by accident by removing the octane.pref file from the houdini17.5 folder in Documents.

Now everything is working again and a new octane.pref is generated. Probably the octane.pref file got corrupted. If I open the file in my text editor, it is full of 0000 0000 0000 0000 etc. Please find the file attached.
Very strange.

It is not possible to attach a file with .pref extension, so I have renamed the extension.

Regards,
RL

I'm glad that the problem has been resolved! Yes, somehow it seems that this file gets corrupted ... this is why after having these kinds of weird issues, sometimes the problem can be fixed cleaning the $HOME folder.

Thanks,
-Juanjo