I'm not sure if this is a Houdini issue or Renderman but I'm gonna ask it here in case anyone has an idea. There are some heavy objects scattered in my scene (pack and instance is checked on my copy node). What I'm noticing is that Houdini starts culling out instances that are farther from the camera and as a result they are missing from renderman render too which is not what I want!
Is there a way to force those instances appear in the render?
Is it possible to increase the limit of Houdini culling objects farther from camera?
Ideally, How do you go about displaying bbox version of heavy objects (or their lowres version) in viewport but have their highres version render at render time? I enabled bbox mode on the file node (which is where my heavy obj is coming from) but it stops transferring attributes downstream. For example I can no longer access the groups in this mode.
Culled instances will appear in the render. They are only culled from the viewport display.
The viewport culling is configurable in the display settings dialog. (hit d in the viewport)
BBox mode in the file sop creates a literal box, no reference to the file is created. There's no reason to use this mode except to see the size of an object. Use load as packed disk primitive, with display mode set to bounding box to defer loading to render time and display as a box. (I'm not sure about renderman support for packed disk primitives. Renderman used to require writing RIB archives for any kind of deferred geometry loading.)
When you say culling out are they converting to bboxes or completely disappearing? bbox optimisation would be viewport only and configurable in display options
Disappearing may be caused by clipping planes and would affect render too So maybe double check that your far clipping plane on the camera is far enough
You are right guys! They are actually not culled! It was a mistake on my end.
However about the 3rd item, I'm not able to speed up viewport by enabling packed disc primitive on the file node that's reading the .obj file. The performance is the same with or without it. How would one go about making an LOD of an object (for example via example polyreduce) and use that to be displayed in viewport but have the highres one rendered?
