Pros & Cons of working at different scales?

[Nettles]

So I'm pretty new to Houdini, and I'm used to working at real world scale in Cinema. A lot of what I do is smaller stuff, and when making chairs, product mockups, cups etc I tend to work in cm scale. What I've done up to this point is make two 'default' scene setups for Houdini with Redshift. One with a cm scale and one with meter scale for larger pieces or general generative stuff (as most tutorials seem to be in 1m scale and are easier to follow along with that way)

 

My question is, are there specific pros and cons of working this way? Would I be better off just using Meter scale for my small pieces and then resizing objects to .01 when I want to make them 'real size'? 

 

I say this mainly because I've seen a lot of different opinions from searching this forum and I'd like to know if there is a best practice to avoid running into issues down-the-line. For example I've noticed when I copy geo from a cm scale project to a meter scale one it doesn't take that into account so a 30cm shaderball suddenly becomes a 30m one. Equally, when I'm working at 1m scale and I size down my assets to accurate scale before rendering, it becomes more finicky to setup shots as the zoom tools are all calibrated for much larger geo and feel overly-sensitive. I'm also curious as to how simulations perform at different scales, and how scale interacts with USD and Solaris. 

This might all sound rather confused (mainly because I am!) but I'd just like to get things working so that when I'm dealing with things from DoF to SSS in Redshift that I'll be getting approximately accurate results. Going forward I expect to be working both on smaller assets that I will shoot on their own, as well as with groups of assets from 10cm - 10m to use in larger meter scale scenes. Apologies if this seems like a mad ramble but I just want to get some clarity on how best to approach asset creation and management for a consistent real world scale!
 

Thanks, Connor

Edited January 29, 2021 by Nettles