[SOLVED]Instance Animated Geometry With Time Offset?

[Atom]

Hi All,

I have an animated palm tree that loops every 360 frames. Currently I am deploying many copies of this using the Copy/Stamp approach with a random frame number being stamped into the Frame field of a Time Shift node. This works, but is slow. I would like to leverage instancing so I can increase my count and performance but I can't figure out how to implement the time offset using instancing.

As far as I can tell you can only specify a single object for instancing. One solution would be to create 360 objects, each with a File node inside, pointing to the various frames of my animated palm tree. This seems a bit ridiculous to me and I wonder is there some other way to cause instancing to reference alternate frames in a geo sequence?

Here is my VEX code for instancing so far which does deploy 5 different static trees.

i@instId = int(rand(@ptnum)*5)+1;                       // Instance index required for Houdini instancing.
s@instance = sprintf("/obj/geo_palm-%d", i@instId);     // Used by Houdini and Redshift.

// randomize scale
v@scale = fit01(rand(@ptnum+801),1.8,2.8);

// Randomize rotation.
vector axis = {0,1,0};      // Axis to rotate.
float rand = 0;
vector4 quat = {0,0,0,1};
vector4 product = {0,0,0,1};
rand = fit01(rand(@ptnum+311),0,360);
quat = quaternion(radians(rand), axis);
product = qmultiply({0,0,0,1}, quat);
@orient=product;

 

Edited February 6, 2017 by Atom

[anim]

 

[Atom]

I think I can use one of those techniques in your posted example file.

Thanks Tom!