Ben Andersen

If you want to instance a network, you need to make an HDA out of the network that you can use in your scene multiple times.

If you want to instance geometry on to points, you can do that with the instance object, the copy sop, or using packed geometry.

Not sure exactly what you mean, sorry.

SideFX just announced that they're supporting a new cloud rendering service that might be worth checking out.

You wouldn't get the immediate speeds of rendering on the GPU, but if you're rendering sequences, it would run in parallel and maybe come back faster than running everything in sequence locally, even with a GPU renderer.

https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3121&Itemid=66 [sidefx.com]

I'd guess this is done by advecting millions of points through a smoke sim and have them add their color on top of each other. So you get bands of color where there are lots of points, but it gets low opacity where there aren't many. You could additionally put on a force that pushes the points towards areas of higher density in the smoke as well, to get more discrete lines in the trails.

Another option would be to scatter a few points (like 20) that are bound to the character (attrib interpolate) that emits a trail coming off the character as he runs. You can then use that to build a discrete curve coming off of those points either to push your millions of points towards that curve, or to increase the density of your points in that area, or something.