Best/most optimal way to load your packed geometry onto simulated points?

[magneto]

Hi,

So I made an rbd sim where I had only 200 unique pieces. Then I made an rbd sim using 100s of each of these pieces. I cached the simmed points.

After this, I want to place my unique pieces onto these points. What's the best and most optimal way to do this for the viewport and the renderer?

I have seen many different techniques, I can't tell which one is the best.

Should I just use Instance SOP? Should I save the first frame of the sim and use this instead?

I can transform them using Transform Pieces SOP, but I don't know how to bring them optimally.

Should the pieces be brought it as packed geometry, packed fragments, packed disk geo, or something else? I want Houdini to know everything is coming from these 200 unique pieces so it can show them more efficiently in the viewport and the renderer.

I noticed if I save my pieces onto separate files as packed fragments, Houdini is saving the entire packed geometry onto each file that takes a lot of space.

How do you do this?

 

Thanks

[Skybar]

I've been using the Instance SOP a lot lately, its quite nice. It's really easy controlling what to instance with the instancepath string attribute, if you have 1 piece per file on disk.