Houdini and heavy scenes

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julius
Posts: 248
Joined: 12 Jun 2009, 10:56

Houdini and heavy scenes

Post by julius » 04 Oct 2016, 23:32

Hello all,

A saw that some of you got now a significant experience in houdini now, and I would like to know if houdini is able to manage heavy scenes as we easily can in Softimage.
I think there is no explorer in houdini, no passes and partitions...So how do you manage tons of assets in houdini ? Is it a pain or not ?

Thanks for your answers !

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Mathaeus
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Joined: 08 Jun 2009, 21:11
Location: Zagreb, Croatia
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Re: Houdini and heavy scenes

Post by Mathaeus » 05 Oct 2016, 00:13

It has by design ability to load a lot of things directly from hard disk, so, what I found while ago as life saver, it is to utilize that. Let's say even in case of plain obj file with materials assigned to clusters, it's enough to have a material in H with obj's cluster name, and material is assigned. In other word, it worth to utilize other apps too, or number of H scenes, as non-destructive update could be just a save and reload. While scenes are relatively small, a lot of procedural stuff could take a significant time to compute, several minutes is nothing unusual, so this is another reason for collecting the 'baked' output from many resources.
Passes are different, you can create as many Mantra ROPs (ROP = rendering operator) as you wish, and distribute objects, lights and other options around.
Regarding viewports, SI is still a way stronger. Some things like displaying a lot of instances could be faster in H, anyway. Generally, H won't stop when dealing with something huge, but it's also more memory hungry, won't hurt to have as much RAM as you can afford.

NNois
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Joined: 09 Jun 2009, 20:33

Re: Houdini and heavy scenes

Post by NNois » 05 Oct 2016, 02:30

I found Houdini stronger than SI in this place, because he has support for "packed primitives" who are sort of cached meshes displayed on the GPU.

Plus you can even tell him to load only what you use and by default he is processing only what's needed to be updated. For example if only one object is visible in the scene, the scene will display very fast.

julius
Posts: 248
Joined: 12 Jun 2009, 10:56

Re: Houdini and heavy scenes

Post by julius » 05 Oct 2016, 13:18

Thanks a lot for infos guys !

I'll give it a try soon, and ask you if I encounter problems.

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SamHowell
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Location: Birmingham
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Re: Houdini and heavy scenes

Post by SamHowell » 06 Oct 2016, 10:07

Use the File Cache SOP often. Get into the habit of sending geometry to disc at each stage of your scene construction. When loading back in have a look at loading as Packed Geometry and display as bounding box. Reduce the calculations Houdini has to do every time you change a setting. It won't be on the level of something like Clarrisse but you will find you can have very heavy scenes.

julius
Posts: 248
Joined: 12 Jun 2009, 10:56

Re: Houdini and heavy scenes

Post by julius » 07 Oct 2016, 12:21

Thanks !

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