Basics Speed up your scene

Houdini has several “shading modes” (methods for drawing the scene in the viewer), including only showing bounding boxes.

See the section on viewing for more information.

1. Open the viewport menu and choose Display > Display options or press D.

2. Click the Optimization tab.

1. In the display options window, click the Optimization tab, click the Interactivity sub-tab.

2. Turn on Interactive mode and choose the shading mode to use while tumbling.

3. Set the Render time. If Houdini takes longer than this number of milliseconds to redraw the view, it will switch to the simpler shading mode. This lets you only use the simpler shading mode when view redraw is actually slow.

   Set this to 0 to always use the simpler mode when changing the view.

1. In the display options window, click the Guides & Markers tab. Turn on the display of primitive hulls.

2. Click the Optimization tab, then click the Culling sub-tab.

3. Turn on Display hulls only.

• In the display options window, click the Optimization tab, click the Culling sub-tab and turn on Remove backfaces.

  This prevents Houdini from drawing any polygons that face away from the camera. This is a useful optimization if you already have airtight models, but it can make modeling harder.

1. In the display options window, click the Optimization tab, click the Culling sub-tab.

2. Use the Display geometry of type pop-up menu to display all geometry or only display a certain type of geometry. You can use this to eliminate the display of geometry types you aren’t interested in right now, speeding up the display.

3. Use the cull by drawing primitives out of every option to only draw a certain percentage of all the geometry in the scene. This is mostly useful for decimating polygonal models to speed up the display.