dryrainstudios Posted January 17, 2012 Share Posted January 17, 2012 Howdo fellow .hipsters I was just wondering what houdini did when it exported an animated fbx file. I have successfully exported 2 animated trees and leaves between houdini and maya which took 1hr 15 mins for 200 frames moving 161552 polys per tree. Houdini then took another 45 minutes to return to normal and clear the fbx window. During this time it was still using a large amount of the computers ram. The trees are almost identical. The geo is deforming. Each tree is 2 sops: branches (146552 poly) and leaves (15000poly) I'm running windows 7 pro (64bit) on an intel Xeon 2.4ghz dual proc with 24gig of ram installed. Is it ok to just kill houdini after it has written the fbx file? or is it doing some thing else other than trying to clear the cache? thanks Ed Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LaidlawFX Posted January 18, 2012 Share Posted January 18, 2012 Howdo fellow .hipsters I was just wondering what houdini did when it exported an animated fbx file. I have successfully exported 2 animated trees and leaves between houdini and maya which took 1hr 15 mins for 200 frames moving 161552 polys per tree. Houdini then took another 45 minutes to return to normal and clear the fbx window. During this time it was still using a large amount of the computers ram. The trees are almost identical. The geo is deforming. Each tree is 2 sops: branches (146552 poly) and leaves (15000poly) I'm running windows 7 pro (64bit) on an intel Xeon 2.4ghz dual proc with 24gig of ram installed. Is it ok to just kill houdini after it has written the fbx file? or is it doing some thing else other than trying to clear the cache? thanks Ed Make sure not a single point is deleted or added. When fbx is used this way, it will maintain one file of points, and a second file of these points and their motion. If there are any points generated or removed it will generate nearly a file per a frame within these two files. This process is ok for deforming geometry like a rigged character, but changing point totals is a little different. Conserve memory at the expense of render time. If you do not do this it will store the information from the last frame, and create huge ram demands. It will lengthen the process, but the ability to use your computer in the back ground and potentially run two of these caches will be of great benefit. As an alternate, I would try alembic or obj if you can. When I needed fbx we had no choice since we needed to send our maya renders out to a farm, with only native support and a file size limit, if your not in this position I would recommend an alternative format. As for killing Houdini there is some data dumping process towards the end that has a familiar cycle if you watch the task manager, or top, you can kill at. I would be hesitant to kill that, since you don't want to go through that process and loose it all because you prematurely killed it. I believe there might be a substep for the initial and then each frame. We worked on only 8 to 12 gigs of ram and it was done in an hour or so with the fbx caching, for a good 30s+ 720 frames, it was done before we got back for dinner within an hour. Below is the project. Funk Blaster Project Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dryrainstudios Posted January 20, 2012 Author Share Posted January 20, 2012 Thanks for that. I think it was the lack of "conserve memory" that was bloating it out at the end We are going to be looking in to alembic when we have some down time in coming weeks no points were deleted or harmed during this post Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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