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Houdini Cloth - Unbelievably SLOW!


Annon

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Have been trying to do tests with the cloth solver over the past few days and find it incredibly slow, in fact so slow it's unusable. Never thought I'd see the day when doing fluid sims would be faster than cloth :D

Has anyone got any tips on how to speed this sloth up? And why I need to have 1024 substeps?

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Things are looking hopeful there will be big performance enhancements in H12!

So I hear ;)

I guess I'll just have to be patient, in the mean time it's going to have to be done in nCloth.

It really is a bit embarrassing actually, I mean it's SOOOOOOOO slow I wish they just didn't have it.

And unstable!

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So I hear ;)

I guess I'll just have to be patient, in the mean time it's going to have to be done in nCloth.

It really is a bit embarrassing actually, I mean it's SOOOOOOOO slow I wish they just didn't have it.

And unstable!

Depending on what you need to do you can use the wire solver instead. It's quite a bit faster, but doesn't produce nowhere near the nice results of the cloth solver.

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I don't think it's fair to call "slow" something, which simply doesn't work :)

:lol: True.

I'm doing a lot of cloth sim currently.nCloth is really powerful. It just works, and works perfectly!. The only thing i'm doing in maya is cloth. I wish we had hCloth in DOPs! It would be pretty awesome :rolleyes:

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:lol: True.

I'm doing a lot of cloth sim currently.nCloth is really powerful. It just works, and works perfectly!. The only thing i'm doing in maya is cloth. I wish we had hCloth in DOPs! It would be pretty awesome :rolleyes:

me too... and it kind of hurt me everytime i close houdini and open maya for ncloth... :S

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Have been trying to do tests with the cloth solver over the past few days and find it incredibly slow, in fact so slow it's unusable. Never thought I'd see the day when doing fluid sims would be faster than cloth :D

Has anyone got any tips on how to speed this sloth up? And why I need to have 1024 substeps?

Speed is greatly dependent on the geometry and settings used, so it would help the developers to see your .hip file. As Jason mentioned, there's been great improvements in the next major version of Houdini so I think it would be helpful to send SESI the specific geometry where you see a big discrepancy between nCloth and hCloth. When you do this, it's crucial that you mention the specific Maya and Houdini versions tested.

We keep all customer files under NDA so if it's something which is production related, please upload to ftp://ftp.sidefx.com/incoming/ and then email "support AT sidefx.com" letting them know the filename that you uploaded and the versions of software which you tested with. Anything uploaded to that FTP site is only visible to SESI employees.

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Cloth in Houdini has never been recommended for clothing, ironcally enough. This may all change in H12 of course, but in H11- its really been about bending/breaking metal, etc. And Edwards offer is very kind -- SESI might be able to suggest remeshing tricks to help you over the hump and they'll have more test cases for H12 :)

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Cloth in Houdini has never been recommended for clothing, ironcally enough. This may all change in H12 of course, but in H11- its really been about bending/breaking metal, etc. And Edwards offer is very kind -- SESI might be able to suggest remeshing tricks to help you over the hump and they'll have more test cases for H12 :)

Here's a quick scene you can try:

Create a grid, move it 10 in Y, 30x30 divisions and make it cloth.

Create a sphere, 20x20 divisions and make it static.

Hit play and watch it crash.

Maybe a bit of an over exageration, but seriously, I've been trying to do something like that as a "quick" test, even doing some polygon optimisation with polyreduce and it's just un-usable.

I'm currently doing fluid sims with 1000 x more "points" and having decent speeds...

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Here's a quick scene you can try:

Create a grid, move it 10 in Y, 30x30 divisions and make it cloth.

Create a sphere, 20x20 divisions and make it static.

Hit play and watch it crash.

As I mentioned, we need .hip files because even within H11, improvements were made so if you have a bad H11 version it wouldn't help you.

The problem with a Polygon Mesh Sphere is that it has primitives at the top with 0 length edges. So a Fuse SOP fixes things greatly here. I've attached my fixed file here and it seems to fine until it gets into the massive collision jumbled mess in H11.0.798.

clothSimple.hip

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  • 1 month later...

I can believe it without trying it. You could try trying to make sure that your cloth have as regular triangles as possible -- make sure your Grid is outputting triangles, etc.

Yeah it's going to be slower than nCloth. However you'll find that quads generally work best as cloth topo, you can tell it to triangulate it internally for collisions via the collision triangulations setting on the solver (set it to 3). Set your collision Tolerance to say, 0.02 instead of 0.05 and up your minimum substeps a bit. On your cloth object turn down the contact repulsion (under collisions) so you get less crazy forces when things collide. Your cloth thickness is probably OK by default. As a last resort up the max substeps, aaand that recipe should get you error free cloth. Oh, and avoid n-sided polys on all objects.

-M

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  • 3 years later...
  • 1 month later...

I'm wandering the same thing. Just started doing some cloth sims on H14 and was irritated and confused at the amount of time it was taking. I even thought maybe I was doing something wrong until I read this forum topic. Any word from SESI people on what the status on this is??

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