Hello,

I noticed that Houdini can handle millions of polygons when working with geometry inside of it, but when I try to import a 5 million poly obj, it freezes. I have 32gb system, so memory shouldn't be a problem. Do I have to just keep waiting, or is there a known limit for obj importing?

Thank you.

I was unaware of a limit, but while you are waiting pull up the Windows Task Manager or OSX Activity Monitor and examine how much memory is actually being used. Once you exceed physical memory, a slow down may occur. What is the CPU load while you are waiting, is there CPU activity?

Also, the venerable OBJ format is ASCII text based so a five million polygon mesh needs at least three vertices per-face so that gets us up to fifteen million points or more which can be a slow import considering the import routine is probably only single core.

Also try to use a different word other than “freeze”. To me, a frozen system is nothing works at all, the mouse won't move etc.. Is that your experience? Is your entire desktop “frozen” or is Houdini just busy reading your jinormous file?

Hi,

Thank you for your reply. I agree, I misused the word freeze. It was Houdini that was “frozen”. Looking at task manager. the task gwavefront was processing at 15% cpu, I guess I'll just have to wait a while, since it's single core operation. The file is huge because it's a 3d scan of a room, maybe I'll split it up into parts.

when loading very heavy geometry I always set Houdini to Manual - bottom right corner change “Auto Update” to “Manual”
this will prevent Houdini from cooking/displaying anything.
but you can still navigate around and drop nodes in the network…so in your case you could place down a file node, load the obj and do some work before you ever have to display the actual geometry.