Hi everyone. I'm a few months into using Houdini. I jumped in and made the commitment because it's exactly up my alley if I want to make my movies. I'm working on my first upcoming feature film that I wrote and am directing. We're doing an ocean scene with a ship that will be attacked in the inciting incident scene. I'm doing great with fluids and flips so far. I've got a question for anyone that may know the answer to this. How do I work in real time with real time speed within large FBX files?

I downloaded a huge ship with all the details in it as a FBX file. I've even built a new rig just so I can work fast on this movie and have the gear to handle it. I got a 20 core xeon cpu, (room for another identical to make 40 core), 64gb ram (can upgrate to 1000 gb ram) and two 980 TI gpu's all on a Z10PE-D8-WS server board. Still when I open up this FBX file and set the bottom of the screen to ‘manual’ and even disable simulations it's still way to slow to get anything done in this scene. Even just changing positions in the viewer is taking several minitues to update.

Can anyone help with some advice? There's got to be a better way to do this.

Pierre-James

Assuming you are having bunch of OBJ containers with object merges in it as you used FBX?

If thats the case, can you switch to Alembic and alembic node?
Houdini is probably one of the slowest 3d packages when it goes to have all objects in separate OBJ containers (same as every single 3d app does it).

Houdini isn't designed to work in ‘real time’ like a game engine.
However there are things you can do to speed up your workflow
don't display any geometry that you don't need - if you're doing a fluid sim then you don't need to see 90% of the details of a ship, likely just the sections that have some interaction with the water - and even then you can build a low res version of that section for collisions etc
if the fbx ship is animated you could write that animation out to alembic
this would give you more display options and would be faster to play back/scrub.

Like the other said, as soon as you are able switch it to alembic. Depending on the renderers your using you'll get a massive performance and memory boost with Alembic, you can also display the ship in more creative ways, like centroid or bounds, once it's alembic. Alembics are also packed by default, but you could also natively pack the ship up reducing it's footprint.

You could also create an Object Merge in another Geo container and do a * to bring in all the FBX subnet geo into the new container and hide the FBX subnet. you can click on Pack Geometry Before Merging, Create Pre-Primitive Path, and Add Path Attribute, and then you have one stream you can blast/delete to your hearts content for various collisions and destruction work. Setting the path attribute to path also makes it very similar to what you'd get if you'd imported an Alembic, and helps with the Alembic export ROP.