Load offset with a filemerge node, massive sim workflow question.

[tricecold]

So I have this wedges of nearly 1000 sims baking on the farm. I would like to load them back with several filemerge nodes but with frame offsets inherited from a Cd attribute in the scene. I thought of doing this with file instancing and baking the offset and cache numbers as attributes, but this will only work for Mantra, I will have to export this geometries out of Houdini with the offset. Any ideas ? Also the sim needs to hold its first frame until the frame offset value is reached.

[anim]

you can still do it with pointcloud with instancing attribs (orient, pscale, ...) and string attribute containing file path (with offsets however you want) 

then just use Instance SOP using that attribname

it will load geometry for all the points as packed disk primitives, then you can unpack or whatever

[tricecold]

thanks Tomas, I will give it a go now.

[tricecold]

you can still do it with pointcloud with instancing attribs (orient, pscale, ...) and string attribute containing file path (with offsets however you want) 

then just use Instance SOP using that attribname

it will load geometry for all the points as packed disk primitives, then you can unpack or whatever

 

Worked like a champ.However, another issue came to rise due to super high amount of bgeos created. Instead of bgeos sequences I am thinking of wedging into alembics. With alembics thou I would have to somehow offset the alembics cache frame without using the cache offset in the string attribute ? Anymore ideas?

Edited November 17, 2015 by tricecold

[tricecold]

So I had some progress on this. I have points where I instance to abc files on disk, previous version was using a string to  offset the bgeo sequence, but since abc loads a single file this wont work.

Documentation shows that alembic has sample time which must be divided by fps from the current frame. But any ideas on how to make this work on point instancing.

Edited November 18, 2015 by tricecold

[anim]

you can either hack into Instance SOP

replace File SOP with Alembic sop and copystamp frame from some attribute on your points

 

or

 

just let it copy alembics without time offsets

while keeping them as delayed load alembics vary primitive intrinsic abcframe on them (e.g. using prim wrangle), that needs to be in seconds though

then you can convert to polys as you wanted

Edited November 18, 2015 by anim

[tricecold]

Thnx, I will give both a try, appreciated

[tricecold]

you can either hack into Instance SOP

replace File SOP with Alembic sop and copystamp frame from some attribute on your points

 

or

 

just let it copy alembics without time offsets

while keeping them as delayed load alembics vary primitive intrinsic abcframe on them (e.g. using prim wrangle), that needs to be in seconds though

then you can convert to polys as you wanted

 

second advice worked like a breeze, all I have to do is to figure out how to have this offset working with delayed load procedural thnx Tomas

[anim]

Until you unpack, it's Packed Alembic, which is automatically rendering as delayed load from disk so in theory you don't have to do anything

[tricecold]

Must have done something wrong then, I will check

[anim]

Yes, don't convert to polys, I just mentioned that since you wanted to export actual geometry, but if you want to render directly in Mantra keep it as Packed Alembics