Point rendering/Billions of particles

[DeKo]

Hello guys,
there are so many old threads how to render the big amount of particles, I'm guessing maybe there are some modern approaches in newer Houdini versions?

Here is my workflow:
I have saved 100 mln of particles (pos, vel, color)

It takes 3 min to render and 30GB of Ram if I load them by Load SOP.
It takes 2-3 times quicker if I use Delayed Load Shader. But it's hard to use it coz I have procedural particle scale, dynamically changing colors by vex, etc in SOP level. Re-make everything in shader seems too complicated in my case.

Also, I tried Packed Disk Primitive in Load SOP. But to make color, pscale changes I must unpack it and performance drops like loading file as usual geometry.

Any other suggestions how to deal with big point counts? Maybe there is any more modern way?

Thank you in advance.

[schwungsau]

changing thie values at rendertime is modern way. pathtracing is much faster with dealing huge amount of data.
the bottleneck is the opengl display, this slows it down a lot. USD might be fast enough, it will come soon ! you can already usd plugins already on github. also, VDB4 can store particles too, thats may be future improvement in data files handling.

but i think doing fast GPU pathracing and change values in realtime is current state of art. that's what i am doing.

Edited November 7, 2017 by schwungsau