Loop animation instance offset

[Butachan]

Hi, I am relatively new at Houdini and I am sure I am making a few things quite inefficiently. But this is one I am pretty sure I must be doing it quite terribly so:

Basically I am doing a small flock simulation from scratch (which my producer gave me a whole day and a half to do, ) with a animated loop for the bird instance (wich I also had to do on the same day an a half). Now, when using instances the animation works super fast, but once I offset the loop with a copy stamp technique on a time blend everything becomes quite slow....understandably. The technique I got it from Peter Quint tutorial here:

https://vimeo.com/24969874

And it is quite useful (thanks Peter) but it is 5 years old! I wonder if nothing has changed since then. Because as I said is amazing how fast using instances Houdini is but as soon as I use the copy stamp technique, not so. And I have 200 birds only.... i cannot imagine the cost if it is 5000 particles.

 

[Leonard]

Hi. It's always a good idea to attach your hip files. No amount of text will equal a hip.

[Butachan]

9 minutes ago, Leonard said:

Hi. It's always a good idea to attach your hip files. No amount of text will equal a hip.

Well, in this case is not about a particular project but a technique wich is quite well described by Peter Quint on his tutorial. So basically there is nothing working bad, basically everyting works as it is suppose to. Like in the tutorial video I included. I was just asking if by any chance after 5 years anyone knows of a more efficient (that doesn´t slow down the simulation)way to offset the animation of an instance object.  But I guess i can create later a small hip file that illustrate the problem, but again Peter tutorial is better at explaining the issue, he actually mentions it at minute 7'10". I will try to put something together soon.

[Leonard]

Without watching the video for too long, I can already day that since 5 years packing had been added to Houdini. Have you tried choosing the pack primitives before copying option on the copy SOP, you could lock some upstream nodes, you could use mantras delayed load procedural... Until then, waiting for hip

[mestela]

Here's a way using the instance sop. It's fast if you keep it in bounding box mode, you can set it to display full geo if you need to do viewport tests, and just flip it back to bounding box when you're done. Mantra will always render the full high quality geo regardless, so you don't have to worry about that.

The other option of course is to learn the crowd solver, but sounds like that might not be possible on your deadlines. Tell your producer to be more realistic.  

simple_crowd.hipnc

Edited April 30, 2016 by mestela

[Butachan]

 

Quote

Tell your producer to be more realistic.  

HAHAHA ...Incredibly, I actually pull it off.
In this case it wasn't anyone  fault, it was merely a case of external factors messing up terribly very close to deadline. Thankfully the task in itself is so limited I could cut a bunch of corners (My bird has no eyes or feathers!)

 

[Butachan]

2 hours ago, mestela said:

Here's a way using the instance sop. It's fast if you keep it in bounding box mode, you can set it to display full geo if you need to do viewport tests, and just flip it back to bounding box when you're done. Mantra will always render the full high quality geo regardless, so you don't have to worry about that.

The other option of course is to learn the crowd solver, but sounds like that might not be possible on your deadlines. Tell your producer to be more realistic.  

simple_crowd.hipnc

WOW this is an excellent solution! It does require you to bake the animation to disk though. But in deed is a lot faster than stamping. Thank you very much for the explanation notes in the network, they are very clear. I hope this help other people too.