Rendering from file

[Marc]

Hiya all

This should be easy for those in the know.

I wanted to try the "render from file" option in my object, since it seems as if that would be a quicker way to process my 450 000 hairs.

So my question has to do with the shaders. I've saved out my geo with "indirect shader paths" turned on in the shader SOP. The only way it seems that I can get the hairs to render with the shader attached is if I turn on "Declare All SHOPs" in the ROP (and "sscan geometry"). This is cool, but I'm not exactly sure what its doing. Is it just declaring the shader once in the ifd and all the hairs are referencing it? Or is it declaring the shader for each hair?

Thanks

Marc

[thekenny]

i think if you assign the shader at the object level, and when you made the geo file you doesn't have the shader assignment done at SOP level.. you should get the shader call once for the object, not for a tonne of hairs.

are you going to go the procedural dso route eventually to generate all those hairs at render time?

-k

[Marc]

Perhaps... at the moment I have 450 000 hairs on his head and they're taking about 3 minutes a frame to render at NTSC res.

Of course, that's just his head . Once I add in all the other stuff.. well... lets just say that I might look into a procedural DSO at some point.

Ciao

M

[edward]

Does your 3 min include SOP cooking time? Won't a procedural dso not help much with speed but rather with just more with memory?