Hi,

If I "unpack" OTLs to the git friendly folder structure form and use them like that is there some expected file IO or scanning performance loss compared to regular "packed" libraries in an environment with hundreds of OTLs?

Tnx!
o.

Is anyone doing this?

My initial intention was to "pack" the otls at release time using the hotl tool but in my testing I pretty much immediately encountered a couple of otls that "unpacked" fine but errored out when "packing" back. And there is no useful error information from the hotl tool. The weird thing is that those same otls unpack and pack just fine when using the asset manager gui inside Houdini.

olliRJL
Is anyone doing this?

My initial intention was to "pack" the otls at release time using the hotl tool but in my testing I pretty much immediately encountered a couple of otls that "unpacked" fine but errored out when "packing" back. And there is no useful error information from the hotl tool. The weird thing is that those same otls unpack and pack just fine when using the asset manager gui inside Houdini.

I have a mix of packed and unpacked otls in the pipeline and haven't seen if it causes a performance impact. The number of otls is more of a factor than if they are packed or not. It's better to not install tools that you aren't using.

I can't recall when I asked this (and don't have access to the email/bugdb anymore) but at some point I believe someone at SideFX confirmed to me that otls accessed via the expanded VCS friendly mode were technically slower than the standard .otl/.hda files. I don't think it's by all that much, but probably more noticable the more of them you have and if they are stored on a network drive.

Thanks guys!

Kinda what I was expecting to hear. Hosting these on network drive surely is a factor but I'd also imagine that they get cached pretty well (atleast on linux) for subsequent launches.

Good thing is that I also managed to resolve those couple of hotl breaking cases - it was just a matter of touching the assets in them with a more recent version of Houdini - doh. Would be nice though that hotl actually gave some more informative error messages.

Cheers!