Houdini 20.5 Basics

Speed up your scene

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Speed up drawing and tumbling

You can use controls on the Display Options window's Optimize tab to draw lower fidelity scenes to improve interactivity on extremely large scenes.

To...Do this

Show the view optimization controls

  1. Click the Display Options button to the right of the view, or press D in the view.

  2. Click the Optimize tab.

Change the shading mode

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.

Draw hulls instead of surfaces

  1. In the Display Options window, click the Optimize tab.

  2. Turn on Draw Hulls Only under the Culling heading.

Don’t draw back-facing polygons

  1. In the Display Options window, click the Optimize tab.

  2. Turn on Remove Backfaces under the Culling heading.

    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.

Speed up cooking

  • Lock nodes to cache the results of the upstream nodes wherever the node’s output does not change.

  • Profile the network to find out which nodes take the longest to cook and see if you can accomplish the same thing in a more efficient way.

Basics

Getting started

Next steps

Customization

Guru-level