Hi we have scene with a bird rig HDA. That rig we need to load for 40 birds - it is taking forever to open the scene and load everything, looks like it is loading the HDA 40 times. I was wandering if there is way to force houdini to only load that HDA only once since it is one asset… Right now we have to wait almost 15 minutes to get the file open.

thanks for any advise,

cheers,

Viktor

Did you find a solution to this problem ?

This is directly related to the amount of nodes you are loading and the operations each node is performing on initialization.

When Houdini opens a scene, it caches all the nodes in the scene to memory and performs certain checks on the data.
It also bloats your memory footprint.


Every copy of a HDA gets this treatment, and as far as I'm aware you can't instance a node.

So either design your HDA to allow multiple birds to be spawned at once, or perhaps cache your data and then load it using a lightweight asset.

I'm not fully informed on all of Houdini's capabilities so I might missing more substantial that can help you.