Hi guys,

Is there a way to generate ifd's using multi threading? or any other efficient way?

I have a sequence of bgeo's with millions of particles, it is taking hours to generate ifd's..

Thanks…

kare
Hi guys,

Is there a way to generate ifd's using multi threading? or any other efficient way?

I have a sequence of bgeo's with millions of particles, it is taking hours to generate ifd's..

Thanks…

Delay Load Them!

If you already have a sequence of bgeos, there is no need to read them into Houdini just to save to save them back out to an IFD.

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini12.0/nodes/shop/vm_geo_file [sidefx.com]

Thanks wolfwood and symek

Actually I want to generate ifds to render in farm..

Warning though: Having to add a SHOPnet and a SHOP just to delay load will cause slowness in Houdini (huge .hip file etc) if you have 100's or 1000's of objects to be delayed loaded.

You can also add a Rendering Parm to the Object that will insert the load into the IFD without bloating your .hip file with extra SHOPnets and SHOP nodes.

If you only have a few objects to delay load then the SHOP node method is OK but still quite tedious unless you script it.

Hopefully 12.1 will address this somehow.

Cheers,

Peter B

pbowmar
Warning though: Having to add a SHOPnet and a SHOP just to delay load will cause slowness in Houdini (huge .hip file etc) if you have 100's or 1000's of objects to be delayed loaded.
Peter B

Depending on what we are doing we just use an Instance object to get all our delayed loads into the IFD. That way you just have the one SHOP. It can get kinda slow if you have tons of overrides, but it keeps the .hip file bloat down.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of that! Tell me more (since I'm too lazy/busy to experiment at the moment)

Cheers,

Peter B

Has anyone played much with the instanceFile point attrib? It's looking pretty sweet.

Jacob, very cool! I didn't know about that one. I don't see it mentioned in the “What's New” section of the docs either

pbowmar
Jacob, very cool! I didn't know about that one. I don't see it mentioned in the “What's New” section of the docs either

This even worked before the Instance Point Procedural.

You could just use an instance object, with like 5000 points, and which ever attributes you wanted, like bgeo path, cycle name, bounding box info, etc. Then in the vm_geo_file SHOP you would just plop down some instancepoint() expressions to pull the details from the points.

The only real caveat to this sort of approach is light/reflection masks get crappy cause all your objects are names blah. But luckily categories cures all woes.