I'm currently trying to building a terrain tool which allows you to project geometry on to a plane using the Heightfield_project node and then converting the output to polygons and sending it back to Maya.
The video bellow you can see how the tool works in Maya without optimization (1 tile).
The the tool works great but it starts getting slow when working with denser mesh outputs or larger terrain sizes because Houdini has to reconvert the heightfield into polys and send that to Maya.
That's over half a million polys+ which is sent back to Maya every time you do a change to your input geometry that needs to be projected).
The idea I want to implement is to split up the converted to poly Mesh from the heightfield into multiple tiles and have the tool only update the tiles where changes occur in order to reduce the overhead.
Houdini should only send the updates tiles to Maya where changes have occurred.
I have been trying to figure out how to make use of conditionals in Houdini in order to make it work without much success.
To better illustrate what I'm trying to achieve here is quick sketch :
The current setup shows a terrain split into 4 tiles. The projected geometry is only over Tile 0. I need to Houdini engine to only update tile 0 back to Maya.
In the example bellow, the projected geometry is on tile 1 and tile 3. Houdini needs to to send back updated Tile 1 and 3 back to Maya, rest is unchanged.
So basically, for example If geo is on top of tile 1 then send update to Maya, if not then do nothing etc…