jrgauthier
Greetings,
I've been playing around with Houdini for a while now and read or heard about is capabilities of generating a render file (I believe in .ifd) and that render is super fast when doing a render from file…
The question is: How do I do that?
How do I generate a IFD?
How do I render a IFD?
Please can somebody enlight me on the subject! 
Hi there,
I don't know anything about including ifds in main IFD file (although from an analogy to RenderMan this should be possible :?: ), but generally speaking to render from a file, you need to setup a procedural shader called “Mantra Delayed Load” for an object you want to render like this. This shader should point to normal geometry file *.bgeo. The geo file you create from that object with all properties, shaders etc applied.
The speed of such an approach goes from two reasons:
- Houdini doesn't have to include in every IFD (thus for every frame) heavy geometry (in case of hundreds of megabytes this takes a lot of time). IFDs are small and so are easy to load by Mantra from disk.
- Such an archive geometry can have bounding box specified, thanks to which Mantra can precisely anticipate how big chunk of geometry will be seen on screen and thus has to be loaded to memory. This has significant impact on render time of course.
hope this helps,
sy.
EDIT:
I've read your post again, and I'm not really sure if you were asking about rendering geometry from a file or just rendering from a file…
Above deliberation concerns rendering geometry from file.
As to simply rendering from ifd file, all you need to do is turning on this option in Mantra ROP, Main Tab, Disk File toggle. Then render it from command line:
mantra -f my_funcy_ifd_file.ifd
(see mantra -h for full list of options)
Indeed this is noticeably faster then firing up render from GUI because of number of reasons… like problems with mplay that shouldn't exists anyway.
Note that saving your scene as a IFD file is disabled in Houdini Apprentice.
cheers,
sy.
