I bought THIS [www.turbosquid.com] cargo ship model at turbosquid.

It has a .c4d file where all the materials and textures are ready to go.

I made a guided ocean layer sim with proxy collision geometry inside of Houdini and now it's time for rendering.

How would I bring that huge model into houdini?
There are quite a lot containers which are all the same model and I am now trying to replace with a instances.
But I tried exporting / importing it as an alembic which basically works, but I have no idea how to deal with hundreds or thousands of nodes.

Has someone done something similar or how is the usual workflow when bringing such massive models into houdini?

Thanks in advance.

Use the Alembic SOP to import it instead of File > Import > Alembic Scene. That way you get the entire model in one object with multiple packed prims.

twod
Use the Alembic SOP to import it instead of File > Import > Alembic Scene. That way you get the entire model in one object with multiple packed prims.

thanks, that helped with performance

what are those blocks in my viewport?

how do I assign materials and textures to the model? I am not quite used to alembic files and trying to figure out what all those terms (path, shape node, transform node, ..) are and how I can prepare a model in C4d to get better results

You can drop down a “packed edit” sop and on the materials tab choose a material and what you want to assign it too.

-rs

Christoph F
what are those blocks in my viewport?

That is the viewport auto-LOD'ing the scene with bounding boxes because it's exceeding the Scene Polygon Limit (Display options, Optimization tab). Default is 20M. Upping the number will show more of the Alembic prims at the expense of rendering performance.

Thanks so much stovetop and twod!