Has anyone got any experience or knowledge regarding the IFD format?

More specifically, is it at all possible to manipulate the IFDs to insert archives or create references to other archives on disk, without having to stuff all the geometry and shader data into each IFD in a sequence?

As there are some situations where delayed load is not a possibility, we're busy exploring options for our pipeline and any relevant links or documentation in this regard would be most appreciated.

Thanks!
Matt.

mrXSI
is it at all possible to manipulate the IFDs to insert archives or create references to other archives on disk

Yep, the “source” command behaves like #include.

“source fragment.ifd” (without the quotation marks) inserts the contents of fragment.ifd into the master .ifd

For some reason the ifd format help page does not mention this. http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini10.0/rendering/ifd [sidefx.com]

eetu.

Is it possible to somehow change generation of IFD? I.e. I have part of the scene cached in IFD sequence. Now I add some more objects in the scene and I want each new ifd start with “source old.$F4.ifd”
In MTOR you can do this with a RIB Box, which is a really nice feature. You can attach part of the RIB text to a Null and it will be placed in the final RIB file.

Thanks for that eetu - most helpful!

Matt.