Hi

I have a question regarding point instancing, I have cached points which I instance geo on them (disk based with a string).

Is there a way to make this work on a farm without putting in the points into the IFD, kinda like delayed load the points and instance on top during render.

I think that counts as nested instancing, which Houdini does not support. You can however save geometry with packed geos (a sort of instancing) that is loading as a packed disk primitive. Another option is to save geometry with instanced (packed geometry) as an alembic with instancing enabled, and render the packed alembic primitives. I'm not sure how packed geos or alembics relate to point instancing in terms of speed/memory use though. I have a hunch rendering an alembic with millions of instances might not be feasible.

, yes , we are just trying to optimize some really big scenes here, so we are trying to avoid these IFDs with loads of points. and yes we can call it nested instancing