Way to fix texture swimming on Primitives?

[SgtSpamBoy]

Hi all,

Is there a method to apply 3D noise onto animated primitives and avoid the dreaded "texture swim?" I know if I use the "rest" SOP with nurbs or polys, the texture sticks, but that would be too memory intensive for my situation (see below).

I'm creating an accurate DNA model with a sphere primitive for each atom, grouped together into molecules, then swept along a curve. This makes a long DNA strand with thousands of individual primitives, so using nurbs or polys would be too memory intensive - unless there's a way to swap out each primitive with a nurbs/poly sphere come render time without having to bake the entire thing each frame...

Thoughts? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[GallenWolf]

....swap out each primitive with a nurbs/poly sphere come render time without having to bake the entire thing each frame...

Have you considered render time point instancing? Or just bake out all your geo to disk and use a delayed read shader?

GW

[SgtSpamBoy]

Thanks for the tips: I've not tried point instancing yet - I'll check that out.

I'm not too familiar with delayed load shaders, but I can follow it from the help file... I am using displacement, however, but not true displacement (just bump), so hopefully that won't be an issue.