Hi,

Why are there 3 placeholder layers? Are they useful except for mess?

Thanks!

They are useful beyond “mess”, yes.

Adding new sublayers is expensive (sometimes taking several seconds to create), so Solaris maintains a “buffer” of placeholder layers that can be repurposed as and when new layers are created while you're working. This way, the number of times you incur the new layer overhead is reduced substantially. This speeds up general fluidity during scene building.

jason_iversen
They are useful beyond “mess”, yes.

Adding new sublayers is expensive (sometimes taking several seconds to create), so Solaris maintains a “buffer” of placeholder layers that can be repurposed as and when new layers are created while you're working. This way, the number of times you incur the new layer overhead is reduced substantially. This speeds up general fluidity during scene building.

Thank you for reply!
It should be better for hiding these cache layers.

Yes, generally these layers should be hidden in the UI (Inspect Layers panel and the Scene Graph Detail Composition and Layer Stack panes). But doing so should be optional, since sometimes you really want to know exactly what's going on under the hood.

Is there an option to hide those layers in composition panel? Couldn't find any. Thanks.

We went the other way and made them not show up ever. We decided it isn't worth providing an option. The only time their presence would have any effect is if there is a bug in Houdini. But I believe this change was applied to 19.0... Are you still seeing these placeholder layers in a recent build of 19?

mtucker
We went the other way and made them not show up ever. We decided it isn't worth providing an option. The only time their presence would have any effect is if there is a bug in Houdini. But I believe this change was applied to 19.0... Are you still seeing these placeholder layers in a recent build of 19?

Yes I am. I'm using v19.0.455

Oh, my mistake, this is about the composition tab inside the scene graph details. I assumed it was about the scene graph layers pane. I guess I didn't look very carefully at the images. This is probably worthy of an RFE. I haven't seen one filed about it yet.