[HOU-1953] Working with Stylesheets feels incredible unstable

[thomaskc]

This is just as much a question as it is an issue or a bug I think, as it technically works from what I can tell, but if I hit render, stop, make a change and hit render again, it feels like 75% of the time vray and houdini will crash.

Generally speaking working with stylesheets feels very wobbly in vray, and I'm super excited about the fact they are supported! but man.. I have great fears of actually using them for anything serious as I fear rendering an animation would be a nightmare currently.

I am trying to do much things with Vray GPU and im quite happy with the speed and support so far. I have tested in cpu as well as in my experience its just as unstable. Im running houdini 18 460 btw.

Sorry this isn't really a bug report, more so a cry for help and not quite sure if this is normal or if anyone else is working with stylesheets and vray?

Thanks!

[Gosho.Genchev]

You're the first person so far, for more than a year that we've been supporting those, that actually has any interest in using the Stylesheets. We've been asking people and everyone claims they're clunky so they haven't been getting much love.

On the bright side - crashes are usually the easiest to fix so if you hit one, please ping us. In this thread you mentioned rendering, stopping and rendering again produces a crash - what primitives are the stylesheets placed on ? Could you share a screenshot of the stylesheet setup or even better - a hip file ?

Thank you!

[thomaskc]

Hey Gosho!

Heh I figured this might be the case, and please do not stop supporting them! So I have done a bit more digging today and it seems like... if you setup the stylesheets and your references correctly, everything works. However.. if you make any mistakes, you don't get errors, you get one of usually two results.

1. houdini freezes, until you are forced to close it or windows pops up with a close to program notification.
2. Vray actually opens IPR and renders the frame, however houdini freezes and crashes in the back, so.. even though it renders... once you close the IPR you can't do much but force close houdini.

Note this only seems to be the case when you do something wrong, which is very easy to do considering the inconsistent opengl feedback you get, particularly when dealing with sub-level changes to packed crowds, or just normal look dev trial and error.

I am by the way using vray GPU 98% of the time and it really runs well when it works! this particular issue, is the same on CPU, I don't think it's a "rendering" issue per say, more so a vray plugin + houdini error and not sure what to do, so I crash problem.

I will try and see if I can get a log somewhere? I don't have a hip file as I am working on a larger scene and its not really consistent.. but for instance I have a crowd setup, where I am using prim groups to do some basic variation assignment of materials. So say you have 10 agents, after your sim is done, I add a group range or something and pick any number of agent prims (they are packed so you pick entire agents) to be part of it. In stylesheets I was referencing this group but I accidentally made it a point group, instant houdini crash when trying to render... re-opened change it to prim group, everything works perfectly fine.

So in some way it "makes sense" but it also feels very brutal and risky when you are working with it.

[Gosho.Genchev]

Alright, I understand. That's more than enough information - we'll look into it and I'll message back.

Thank you!

[bdancer]

We do not support stylesheets update in IPR and I'm not sure if we will...

[thomaskc]

We do not support stylesheets update in IPR and I'm not sure if we will...

You may not support it, but it does work

I literally just did it 2mins ago, swapping assigned materials around while IPR is running, everything is great and works like a charm! the randomness seems to be that sometimes, the IPR or something else along way fails on the initial load, but if it starts, its just all happy days it seems.

[thomaskc]

Purely for the sake of reference, this is what I am working on, and as you can see I am in the process of setting up stylesheet materials etc for this test setup.

[thomaskc]

Here is an example of what it sometimes look like when it crashes. it always seems to happen in the "loading bitmaps" stage if / when it happens, if it gets past this everything works butter smooth.

In this case I was sort of forcing it to quickly update, by jumping in my timeline, which I know.. is pushing it, but its the exact same error / result that I can get if I have IPR running, stops it and quickly restarts it, sometimes this will cause it to fail at that stage as well.

Sorry I'm not 100% sure where to find the log files that I'm sure it saves? So if you could point me to where I can find them I'd be happy to share them.

Thanks,

[bdancer]

> the randomness seems to be that sometimes, the IPR or something else along way fails on the initial load, but if it starts, its just all happy days it seems.

Well, that's exactly what I mean by not supporting IPR =)

[thomaskc]

> the randomness seems to be that sometimes, the IPR or something else along way fails on the initial load, but if it starts, its just all happy days it seems.

Well, that's exactly what I mean by not supporting IPR =)

But how else you would ever know what you are doing? let alone do any kind of look dev? I'm a one man army here, I don't have a render farm and a render department :P I need feedback please! it's weird though because it clearly works... just.. mostly

[bdancer]

There are no plans to improve stylesheets support; I'll look into those hangings, but anyway there are no plans to support more of stylesheets that we already have...

[thomaskc]

There are no plans to improve stylesheets support; I'll look into those hangings, but anyway there are no plans to support more of stylesheets that we already have...

Well the support feature wise is perfect as it is from what I can tell, and im not 100% sure this is stylesheet specific, although it might be, but I personally have mostly used vray to render crowds so I naturally run into the problem in this context.

I found my render log, and will keep an eye on that too should I crash again, to post my findings.

Thanks!

[glacierise]

Great to see some work in that area! We're planning to use stylesheets too, for controling shaders on deeply packed geometry it seems like the best workflow. Subscribed