V-ray for Houdini - v-ray Decal unstable

[piyush_agrawal]

Hello,

Has anyone else experienced unstable behavior when using v-ray decal nodes in Houdini Sops? For the first time I add it, it works as expected, but after I save the houdini file and restart, anything I do in the same sop tends to crash Houdini all together.
Difficult to create an example for this as its file specific at times and it crashes without any crash report/log

Are there any suggestions to follow while using decal?
Using nightly build : V-Ray for Houdini number:21353 hash:4b0b02d from 08 Feb 2022 17:34 (build number:21353)
V-Ray Core 5.20.20 [3ab60b40] from 8 Feb 2022

ALSO : Where can I find a changelog for nightly builds for V-ray for Houdini?

Thanks,
P.

[Gosho.Genchev]

Hey piyush_agrawal ,

Thanks for the heads up! We'll try to reproduce the described behavior here and resolve any issues. Are there any pointers you could provide me with, e.g. what kind of geometry are you applying the decal to (is it animated; is it alembics or live meshes; are you instancing the geometry or the decal, etc).

As to the changelog - so far we used to update it for major versions/official releases. We're setting things up so nightly builds will also contain a changelog soon.

Best regards!

[piyush_agrawal]

Hi Gosho.Genchev ,

Certain specific incidents : The geometry I have been trying to apply decals to are non-deforming static meshes : bgeo.sc and abc (varying). Houdini crashes less when I switch the viewport update method in Houdini from "Auto Update" to Manual. To understand this behavior, I relocated all decals into a single sop (since decals work on global selection and don't require input stream from objects) and turned the display flag off - my file hasn't crashed yet. Not a fix, but a temporary workflow for the meantime. But if it keep it on and move around in different sops to tweak materials etc, it crashes again. So it's either keeping the entire viewport on Manual refresh or Auto Update with decals off.

Also, i thought it was the IPR or inactive VFB that was the cause but the bug remains even without opening VFB.

Looking forward to changelog on the nightly builds to know if I should update it or not.

Thanks.

[bdancer]

It'll be much easier to help and/or fix this if you could upload a hip file.

[piyush_agrawal]

bdancer I will try to recreate the same problem with a simpler file.

Forgot to mention previously, I'm using Steam Houdini Indie - 19.0.561 - if that somehow helps.