Render Multiple Alembic ROP's At One Time

[renderyourworld]

Hello everyone,

This is my first post so I hope I'm putting this in the right category.

I'm still a beginner when it comes to Houdini but I really wanted to share a trick I learned a few days ago that I thought was really cool! (Although i'm sure this is something most of you have seen before)

I was at work the other day and I ran into an issue where it would have been awesome to render out multiple Alembic files at one time (rather than clicking on each one, hitting render, waiting, then clicking on the next...). After digging for a couple hours I was able to do this with a ROP Network and some Fetch ROP's.

Basically, you make a ROP Network and inside it you make as many Fetch ROP's as you need, each one pointing to an Alembic Output ROP node. Then you can use the Merge ROP to merge all the Fetch ROP's together. Now when you go back up to the ROP Network and hit "Render" it will render out each Alembic file, one after another. Which is really awesome and time efficient!!

I'm sure this is an old trick that a lot of you know already but when I came across it I thought it was really cool!

I wrote an in-depth post about it on my website: (particularly the benefits of doing this while you simulate to save even more time)
http://nicholaspfeiffer.com/blog/2016/1/16/houdini-tip-of-the-day-render-multiple-alembic-rops-at-one-time

Thanks everyone!