I'm trying to control visibility of Hair / Fur geometry and thus playback speed in the viewport.

But when I use Bundles to control the visibility, it seems to have no effect on playback speed whatsoever.

Looks like I have to actually hide the "Hair Generate" SOP with the Display toggle on every single "Hair_Generate" SOP, and then force it in the Render Output to stop Houdini from calculating the Hair while playing the anim in the viewport.

But that's just a horrible workflow when I then need to hide and unhide certain hair SOPs from the render or not.

According to the manual the only alternative to control the hair visibility seems with the RMB display toggle on every Hair Output separately, but that seems broken for hair, besides that its just a horrible workflow because one can't adjust multiple Hair Outputs at once. So try managing multiple Hair Generators that way.

Is there a more user friendly way to control Viewport visibility and Render visibility separately that also affects calculations / playback speed as well ?
Like layers in XSI, where there's a separate control for Viewport and Render visibility ?

Or should Bundle Visibility affect playback speed as well, and is this yet another bug ?


H 20.0.653

Not sure which renderer you're using but most let you list Forced Objects which will be present in the render independently of their visibility flags. I usually create objects in which I Object merge the geometry I need, and place those as Forced render objects. The display visibility of those are turned off. Then display or hide your work objects as needed.

Hey thanks.

I use Redshift, so I add the hair to the forced object list. But the thing is that its several Hair Generate SOPS, so whenever I want to hide a single object from the list its a drag going to the Output Network and dis-and enabling SOP in the list every time.

I also thought about merging all the hair in a single SOP as you say, but then I'm back to square one because I can only hide and unhide all the hair SOPs, and have no easy control over single hair emitters.

Coming from XSI, where one has separate control over render and view visibility of any object using Layers, I was kind of looking for a similar and more user friendly way to separately control render/view visibility of hair geo that actually hides it.

I submitted an RFE for a separate render/viewport toggle for Bundles since theres only a single toggle for both, but I wouldn't bet on that ever happening. Workflow seems to be a at the bottom of the priorities list for Houdini.