Best practice caching heavy geo in Houdini to use in Maya

[andyhowell]

I'm working on the destruction of a very large poly count model. (Will be around 1-2 million points at least).

I've found that the usual File cache bgeo.sc method is quick and easy to load back, with decent responsiveness.

This of course is no good for Maya. I've looked at FBX export as UVs need to be maintained, and also alembic caching which ends up with huge file sizes, and usually brings Maya to a hault.

I've also looked at caching everything through the bgeo.sc method, then splitting out smaller groups of geo from the simulation and caching those separately as alembics

Just wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction on what the best practice is for this type of thing. 

Thanks in advance

 

[sebkaine]

i would try to feed the render engine directly without doing any intermediate step inside maya.

if you use arnold render, i recommand per frame alembic sequence and direct load with the arnold stand-in for geo, points, curves.

https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/An+Introduction+to+Stand-ins

and arnold volume for vdb loading.

https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/Volume

 

 

Edited March 21, 2022 by sebkaine

[Sepu]

you can also try loading all this data through Bifrost Graph. 1 - 2 million will be easily readable by BF. Plus you get all attributes for shading or whatever you need to do with them.