So I did the foolish thing and upgraded to OS X 10.10 (Yosemite). I’m still testing things out but as far as Houdini goes, most things seems to be working. Now, your milage may vary and you may encounter other issues but in my particular case, the following are some of the problems I encountered.
First, the good ’ol licensing issue. This seems to be the case every time I upgrade so not sure if this is a Yosemite thing or I’m just cursed with it. Anyways, the License Administrator tool was not allowing me to install all the licenses. Out of the three licenses I could install, I could only select and install two of them.
Mac OS X Tiger (version 10.4) is the fifth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Mac computers. Tiger was released to the public on April 29, 2005 for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. There are always side effects. The MacOS will have less RAM memory to run in. The MacOS will have less CPU available to it. There will be less disk space available to MacOS.
Side Effects Macrodantin
I tried installing the keys manually and even though I would get an alert indicating the keys were successfully installed, the tool would fail to recognize any of the keys and Houdini would complain that no valid keys were found.
If I installed the keys through the tool, the keys would show up but then the SERVER key would fail saying no server key was found. Ugh!
After starting over several times, and by the way, the Houdini Uninstaller app is also broken, I trashed the licenses file and reinstalled the SERVER key and the two keys I could select through the tool. Houdini recognized them! Yet, the third key was still not being installed. Manually entering the third key would alert me that the key was successfully installed but the key was still not showing up in the installed keys list.
I eventually opened up the license file, which is under /Library/Preferences/sesi/licenses.local, and noticed all three keys were there but the SERVER key was duplicated twice. I deleted one of the SERVER keys, restarted the License Administrator tool and finally, Houdini recognized the third license key!
It’s Not Over Yet
Hold on, the pain continues. Once Houdini launched, I found the Mantra node was failing to render and MPlay was not launching at all.
Solution? It turns out if you launch Houdini through the Houdini shell, as opposed to using the icon, then MPlay and Mantra work fine. At the command prompt, you can type in:
houdini -indie
Side Effects Mac Os Catalina
or
Hindie
You need to use the Houdini shell which initializes the environment. If you use the regular OS X Terminal app you will get a -bash: houdini: command not found error. You can find this shell in the Utilities folder inside the root Houdini installation path.
Side Effects Mac Os X
I’ll continue to report any other issues I may come across. In the meantime, check out the Official Houdini Forums to find out what issues or solutions other users are finding.