attribute driven carve would be nice.

great thread! thanks for the valuable info.
Regarding the gas sand forces dop, could anyone explain how to use that to achieve a sand sim?

Thanks again
YG

great I hope it will be fixed soon or at least if someone could explain how to use it correctly.

Thanks

Hi,
Could someone please explain how to use the gas sand forces microsolver? I tried using it along with the flip solver and a strain matrix field but houdini crashes. Generally i'm looking for a clumping effect for sand.

Thanks in advance, any help is most appreciated.

YG

Thanks alot Jeff, I'll give it a shot.

Cheers,
Yaniv

Hi,
For some reason (possibly a bug) I am unable to get the rest fields to affect the noise in the pyro shader. I've enabled the dual rest in the solver but looking at the import_pyrofields node, it only has the rest2 field even though it is set to import both rest and rest2. In version 11 I do get both rest and rest2 so unless something has changed in terms of how rest fields are used in v12, I am thinking it's potentially a bug.
The scene is simply a sphere used with the pyro fx explosion shelf preset.
If anyone has any insight, that would be very helpful.
Thanks in advance

Yaniv

That's a good idea, any workflow suggestions are more than welcome.
I'll have a look at your scene but definitely removing the displacement connection in the material solved my problem. I could render multiples of the number of instances i previously had with barely any memory impact. Maybe it's a bug or my limited knowledge but even with true displacement off it was still consuming memory as if it was displacing each instance separately.

Cheers
Yaniv

Apparently it was something to do with displacements in those prebuilt materials. I haven't actually used displacement but keeping my previous materials and just disconnecting any displacement nodes resolved the problem. Same scene now starts rendering in less than 30 seconds using only 600mb which is excellent.

Thanks again!
Yaniv Gorali

Hey Rob,
From the first couple of tests it looks like your suggestion works. Using the other prebuilt materials like chrome for example also take forever but clay works fast, even tweaked to enable reflections hasn't made a difference. I'm relatively new to Houdini, is there something in the mantra surface shader, aside from being a large network, that would force unnecessary duplications or processing at render time? if I have 20 different source objects for the instancing, each with its own material, wouldn't mantra get just 20 definitions of those materials or does it actually export a material per instance? (I'm using the fast point instancing option).
Also, would you recommend assigning the materials not at the source level but rather on the instance points? Does it matter?

Thanks alot for your help

Hi
I'm trying to render about 30000 instances of randomly scattered geo chosen out of 20 different models, each with it's own material. The rendering takes forever to even start and consumes over 15 gig of ram. When removing all material assignment the rendering is very quick to start with very low memory usage. I've tried assigning the materials at the instance point level instead of the source geometry but it didn't help.
Could anyone suggest an efficient workflow that would be practical to render that kind of scene?

Thanks in advance!