Screen Size Particles

[pak]

Hello odforce, this may be my first post but I'm loving this community, following recent posts as much as possible.

I'm currently playing with massive pointclouds (few houndred millions scale) in houdini - trying to get a charming poutput of them. I am also in love with raw-looking-stuff so opengl renderer was my pick in this case, for the sake of speed and that raw look.

So, what I want to do is, to render points with fixed screen space size, with a radius.

> When I chose to render "points" with radius, houdini seems to give them a default point texture with an outline and shaded edges, I found no way to modify this default texture (let me know if any, this would be my solution to go)

> when I chose to render points as pixels, obviously there is no radius option

Anything else I've tried basically falls into the "do it yourself manually" category. I've tried rendering the points with sprites since they have perspective and I want to have screen space particles, I've built a point vop to resize the particles depending on the camera distance to make them all seem equally sized in screen space, but as you can imagine, this is very costly with such high number of points.

My question may be odd, but, I would like to have control over that "raw look" of opengl renderer. In other tools I've used so far (C4D expert here) there is generally an option to pick how things look even in raw wireframe/opengl/softwareRenderer renders, in houdini, I seem to find this option missing a lot of important details (even unable to change that default shaded point!).

So I'm here asking for some expertise ~ 

TLDR: looking for a fast way to render half billion particles with fixed screen space size.

 

Edited November 8, 2017 by pak