Howard Matthews

Purely personal POV but I've been super impressed with my Threadrippers. Main workstation I've had a few years has always felt insanely fast, and that's a relatively old Threadripper now. Bought another cheap old one (like, really cheap - mbd + TR1920, 12/24 core for £300 total) to use as a render node the other day - it flies through cooks/sims. Their huge number of PCI lanes makes multiple GPU setups quick and simple to set up, and I've found a lot of my work lends itself to multithreading (forced me to get my head round Compile Blocks...) You get a good bit of bang for your buck with them. Not sure I'll ever want to go back to Intel. Apple Silicon and Threadrippers seem the way forward for my needs.

YMMV of course; depends on the sort of work you do (within both Houdini and the other apps you use) whether tons of cores will work better for you than single-core speed. In Houdini specifically I find multicore speed to be the most important factor as it defines how long I have to wait for cooks/sims; I sorta feel like that part of work has the most impact on my overall productivity - how long I have to wait before I can carry on clicking - but it'd be interesting to hear from others on this.

And at the risk of sounding like generic advice - even for a new machine, chances are you'll get significantly more value from your money if you buy previous generation, rather than the latest and greatest

There may be a better way, but you could make a new geo object, merge the base mesh in, merge the instance objects in - they'll come in as single points - and use a Copy to Points to copy the base mesh to the "instance" points.

Starting with this:



Create a fresh geo object, merge in the mesh and instances (in the Obj Merge node you can use a wildcard to grab all your instances in one go - in your case it'd be /obj/Light01_instance*), and copy the one onto t'other:


When you're merging in the instance objects, make sure Transform is set to Into This Object, so the points' locations come in correctly:

Thanks Konstantin: that approach still leaves me with lots of duplicate paths at the end though (as it creates multiple connections to each point, so each point turns into multiple vertices), the thing I'm trying to avoid: your example starts w 12 points, but by the time they've been swept round the backbone there are 50 paths.

But it made me think of another way - if the points have to be connected up before Sweep can use them, just using Add > Polygons will connect them into a single polyline without making duplicate vertices. Works perfectly - after Sweep -> Ends I end up with the same number of paths as the points I started with.

Thanks for the nudge ^_^