Zachary Wood

Thank you so much for the help everyone! Creating Value Clips with the USD Stich Clips ROP worked perfectly for my needs.

Hello! I am a student working on a short film at my university. We are rendering our film in Renderman, using Husk to send jobs to our farm.

We've run into issues with some of our shots which include large-scale fx and a few shots over 100 frames in length. Is there a way to reference geometry sequences within a USD file on disk, without having the whole sequence (multiple frames of data) flattened into one single file?

For example, when exporting VDB assets into USD, a single USD file is created which references a sequence of separate .vdb files.
We want to do the same with geometry caches. Specifically, we have a big hair groom that comes out around 200 GB in size when all of its 100+ frames are flattened into a single .usd file. This huge file size puts a big strain on our farm server, which seems unnecessary when only around 1.5GB of data is needed for each frame.

I have messed around with the geometry sequence node, but that node is basically just a sopimport referencing a file node inside of an obj context. That means there's no way to make a USD saved to disk that references a sequence of separate .usd or .bgeo.sc files.

I've also tried the usdstitch rop, but that too seems just to take all the files given it and flatten them into a single file, instead of referencing the individual files.

Because it's possible to use a usd_rop to render a geometry sequence to disk with each frame cached as a separate file, I assume there's an easy way to reference that data within a USD file on disk - but I haven't been able to find it yet. Does anyone know how to do this?


Thank you!!