Geometry Objects or Group SOPs?

[ofer]

Hello.

I don't know if this question has a definite answer, but maybe.

Im working on a pretty big mesh in another package. I now want to export it over to Houdini, for shading, rigging and animations.

As I said the mesh is complex and built from many different pieces. Im trying to decide which pieces I want as separate Geometry Object nodes, and which parts to put in geometry node and then break up with Group SOPs.

There are several reasons I want to break the mesh to different parts:

1. Different parts will have different materials

2. Different parts will move differently.

3. I want to hide the little pieces in the viewport, as they are for detail, and not necessary for animation.

This is a mesh of a robot, so since I'll probably use parenting rather then capturing, I will need to put each piece that moves on its own in a geometry object node.

But what about parts that moves together, but have different materials. Is it better to use Group SOPs for them?

Thanks.

[old school]

If there is a tremendous amount of geometry it may be best to steer clear of SOPs including Groups (which can get very slow if there are a lot of them) or the Material SOP which adds string attributes to your geometry also causing bloat.

It is also a philosophy really. Some swear by adding materials at SOP level. Others consider adding materials at the object level and use that as the main determining factor as to how granular to make your object breakdowns.

It's easy to collect several pieces that have the same transforms but different materials and hang that off a Null Object.

Rendering will be a great deal faster with material assignments at the object level as well.

[ofer]

Thanks! I think i will try to break most of it to separate object nodes, and see how it works for me.

Thanks.

[sibarrick]

You might what to think about having the seperate objects that move together in subnets and build everything into one uber subnet so that you can easily duplicate the entire robot by just copying the top level node. This will also make it easier to turn the whole assembly into an asset for animation.