Houdini Apple Silicon

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Finnis Springer

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Aug 3, 2024, 2:20:04 PM8/3/24

to risalceandti

It's a great news that SideFX offers Docker files for their Houdini software: especially when the Houdini Python API already provides a very promising web server module, which together mean powerful, novel, web services can be thought of, given some "ingenuity and web development skill" -- a phrase I really like from this Unreal Remote Control documentation.

So I decided to give the Houdini Docker (Ubuntu) a spin! In this blog I'm documenting some interesting things specific to running on Apple silicon that I encountered along the way while having tinkered with it over a weekend.

I'm on Docker Desktop v4.21 on a M1 MacBook, and all my Ubuntu images if specified simply with a version, e.g. FROM ubuntu:18.04, turn out to be Ubuntu for ARM architecture, -- seemingly because Docker infers from the host --, which in this case is not what we want. So we have to edit the first layer in the Dockerfile downloaded to include the hash if we want Docker to pull the correct Ubuntu for amd64 architecture:

Now if we run docker-compose build, the process will exit before it can complete the last layer where it's supposed to unzip the Houdini Linux build and run the houdini.install script: it prompts for a Yes/No question about whether we want to proceed with "unknown CPU", saying

After the small hack, our Houdini image will be successfully built, meaning we have installed Houdini on a Ubuntu AMD64 image on a MacBook, and theoretically can run it non-graphically to process any Houdini computations -- including serving our next peculiar idea of some web service unique to Houdini capabilities (e.g. insane geometry processing, Vellum, KineFX, Solaris, anyone?), how cool is that?