Anyone using a 4k monitor with Houdini?

#1

Anyone using a 4k monitor with Houdini? My Houdini on a 4k monitor looks too small with unreadable text.

#2

There is a preference setting for Global UI Size which defaults to “Normal.” Have you tried setting it to “High DPI?”

Edit: I should note that you will not see the UI change immediately after changing this setting. You need to restart Houdini in order to see the change.

#3

thanx. yes, I have tried that setting and I even rebooted. still, very tiny and I can’t read the text. I have tried many things, like a registry setting, MS scaling, created a manifest file and that did not help. I was wondering if anyone else is using a 4k monitor and seeing the same issues. Or, if they had a fix that works. Houdini is the only program that is doing this on my new monitor. I have all the Adobe programs, Davivinci Resole, Cinema 4D and Maya and they all look just fine cus they automatically scaled to fit the display.

#4

Since you’re tried all those things, there is the undocumented option of editing the houdini.env file found in C:\Users\Documents\houdini16.5
Open that file with your favorite text editor and add the following line if it doesn’t exist already
HOUDINI_UISCALE = 115
You may need to tweak that number 115 higher or lower until the UI text is readable. Since it’s not documented, I assume that the number is a percentage, so 115 means “render the UI at 115% scale.”

#5

wow, Thank you. That seems to do it. I actually 180 for the upscale. Everything now looks good except the icons on the left side vertical and right side vertical still look small. Anyway to get those icons to be larger?

#6

The Global UI Scale preference setting and the HOUDINI_UISCALE environment variable are supposed to handle icon size, but as you can see, they don’t. So I would categorize it as a bug and report it to SideFX. You might be able to work around the bug by creating custom icons and pointing Houdini to use the custom icon files. You would need to change the directory path for the HOUDINI_UI_ICON_PATH environment variable in the houdini.env file which defaults to $HOUDINI_PATH/config/Icons

#7

thank you. I appreciate you taking your time to help.

#8

One thing that is getting on my nerves is that LCD panel manufacturers are now standardizing on HDTV resolutions, which is fine for TVs, but way too low rez for a computer. You can find about a million different monitors that run at 1920×1080 pixels, but to go to more usable rez for a computer, you pay quite a premium.