ORBX Export Crashing

[joenyc]

I'm attempting to export a 1,320 frame animation to ORBX to render in Standalone. I'm using Houdini 18.0.566 with the matching "OctaneX PR2 Houdini 18.0.566 OSX" plugin. Houdini will only allow me to export around 200 frames at a time or it will suddenly crash. Usually there is no warning when crashing and no error message, the app just closes. If I export in batches of 200 frames, I can get most of the timeline, but for whatever reason it always crashes during the last 85 frames. I find this strange since these are some of the lighter-weight frames.

I've looked at my Houdini file frame by frame and there doesn't seem to be any issue.

Not sure if it is a clue, but the standalone renderer is also throwing these erroneous messages when loading the orbx files I manage to export. These textures are not missing and they are properly rendered by Standalone despite this warning:

It also might be worth noting that the reason I am attempting to use Standalone in the first place is because there is a different bug happening in Houdini (maybe it is related?). After rendering about 10-20 frames of animation (doesn't matter which 10-20), the render begins to fail with this dialogue after each frame:

Sometimes it also then tells me I have no internet connection (I do and it is rock solid) or some other incorrect info about my license:

At this point, very strange things start to happen with Houdini and I have to restart (if it hasn't already crashed). For instance, all of the keyboard shortcuts in the app menus are replaced with the missing-character icon:

Obviously, all of this unpredictability makes it hard to work. But, this is PR software, so I get it. I'm wondering if this Houdini/Octane version is having some sort of VRAM memory management or disk i/o issue. It seems to be incredibly unstable overall.

I'm attaching the Houdini crash logs.

Thanks!

My specs:
Mac Pro (2019) 2.7 GHz 24-Core Intel Xeon W
macOS Catalina 10.15.7
AMD Radeon Pro W5700X 16 GB
384 GB 2933 MHz DDR4
Standalone: Octane X PR2 + PR3
Plugin: OctaneX PR2 Houdini 18.0.566
Houdini 18.0.566

[joenyc]

To further illustrate how strange this ORBX export bug is, this is how I had to export my animation, which ranged from frame 54-1320:

• 54-633.orbx
• 633-833.orbx
• 834-1034.orbx
• 1035-1235.orbx
• 1236-1244.orbx
• 1245.orbx
• 1246-1320.orbx

You'll note that the first batch was able to be quite large. After that I was getting crashes if I went above around 200 frames, so I stuck with 200. Then frame 1245 crashes any time it was part of a larger group, so it had to be exported on its own. This was fully repeatable.

I inspected frame 1245 in Houdini to see if there were any anomalies. There weren't any that I could find. In fact, I was able to render that frame directly in Houdini with no issues.

In fact, I forgot to mention, when these *do* render, they are all lovely. There doesn't seem to be an issue with the actual rendered images themselves.

[juanjgon]

Hi,

This can be some kind of bug in OctaneX, or perhaps a problem related to your system. It is hard to say without the scene. Can you please share it with us to take a look at it here?

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[joenyc]

The scene has a bunch of cached geo dependencies, so it is quite large. Can I private message you a Dropbox link to download? I can’t share it publicly.

[juanjgon]

Yes, sure. You can send the link by private message in this same forum.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[joenyc]

Thanks, just sent it over.

[HMXMedia]

Hi,
I'm not sure if it's the same issue, but I'm also unable to export ORBXs when the framerange goes in the 1400 ish frames.
the idialog shows as if it's exported, but the orbx isn't created in the folder.. I've tried many things but I'm out of ideas. I need the timing in the orbx to correspond to my Houdini timing, so I can't cut the framerange down.
Please find the scene I'm working with attached.
(I don't seem to run out of RAM or cpu power..)

Thanks,
F.

--
Windows 10
1080
Nvidia driver: 456.87
Standalone 2020.2
houdini 18.5.499
octane for Houdini 2020.2.1.2

[juanjgon]

Hi,
I'm not sure if it's the same issue, but I'm also unable to export ORBXs when the framerange goes in the 1400 ish frames.
the idialog shows as if it's exported, but the orbx isn't created in the folder.. I've tried many things but I'm out of ideas. I need the timing in the orbx to correspond to my Houdini timing, so I can't cut the framerange down.
Please find the scene I'm working with attached.
(I don't seem to run out of RAM or cpu power..)

Hmm, I've no idea about what could be the problem, but if you render 1431 frames or more everything seems to work fine. I hope this could help as a workaround.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[HMXMedia]

Hi,
I'm not able to export that many frames to ORBX, I tried that on two different machines but no luck...
Please have a look at the attached screencapture.

Thanks,
F

edit:
0-1430 framerange never works, but 0-1431 works perfectly...

[juanjgon]

Yes, this is what I had found in your previous scene. Somehow if you render let's say 0-1431 frames, everything works fine, but not with 1430. Why this happens is a mystery to me, but I hope that rendering one more frame could work as a workaround.

Thanks,
-Juanjo