On Notebooks that are not totally ancient and run Windows or Linux, Houdini works fine. On those Macs that feature a non-Intel graphics chip, Houdini runs excellently. The only problem are Macs with Intel graphics. Here (probably due to the lack of OpenGL 3.0 drivers supplied by Apple) the main interactive viewport switches to software rendering. What follows is a setup that makes it possible to nevertheless do useful work in this situation:
- Delete the panels labeled “Scene View” and “Animation Editor”.
- From the “Window” menu choose “New Floating Panel”.
- Make the resulting window quite small.
- Right-click in the upper left corner of this window on the tab labeled “/obj” and choose “Scene View”.
- In the upper right corner of the appearing viewport click on “persp1” and choose “Shading -> Wireframe Ghost”.
Now you can create some geometry and hit the render button in the large “Render View” that you see. From now on you should be able to work smoothly in the small Scene View while after a very short time you will see a nicely rendered image appear in the Render View.
This feels like a setup that one get used to. For us mathematicians the main work will happen anyway in the network editor and the control panels of the nodes. This means that now I am fully determined to base my class that starts in April on Houdini.