Brickmaps: What's the equivalent in Mantra?

[GallenWolf]

Hello Odforce!

How's everyone doing? New year, new project - it's exciting

I've been dabbling a bit more into shading and rendering the last few days, and happened to see this PDF:

Using renderman for ray tracing and global illumination in complex scenes

Around page 38, they give examples of brick maps. I've also found similar examples here, at Hosuk's website.

It's very interesting to see the lighting baked in. Is there a way to do something similar in Houdini? I've experimented with saving scattered point geometry as point clouds, and attempting to convert them into .i3d, as well as converting photo maps into i3d, and viewing them with the isosurface SOP. ginfo seems to indicate the i3dconvert'ed file is still a point geometry. Guess I'm doing something way wrong

I think I read a thread in another forum that brickmaps are also useful for storing away large geometry sets, that at rendertime do not require the loading of all the geometry, but just query the brickmap. I think it was for more distant objects, but I'm interested to see how they work.

There are two other posts on odforce with regards to brick mapsand ptfilter, but apart from these two I'm kinda lost

Thanks guys!

Alvin

PS: I may be howling mad. Please forgive me!