Hello,
I have 2 hip files (as shown in photo), just a rubber toy and subdivide node set to a depth of 2. The only difference in the second hip file is that I stashed the input. This causes the file size to go up, which makes sense because the geometry is being saved in the hip file. What I find confusing is how much the file size increased. It increased from 229 KB to 23,799 KB (first photo). If I save the actual geometry as a .bgeo the file size of that is 17,677 (second photo). If I add the original file size of the hip plus the size of the geometry on disk (17,677 + 229) I get 17906, not 23,799. Here is the interesting part. If I freeze the subdivide (instead of stashing it) then save the hip file (as shown in the 3rd photo) the file size is 17,906 KB. This file size makes perfect sense, because adding the original hip file size (229) + the file size of the saved geometry (17,677) it equals 17,906, which is exactly the file size of the hip file that you get when freezing the geometry. So why is the stash node taking up more disk space in the saved hip file?
Thanks

There are various reasons, but I think it's more important to take a step back from this.

You should generally never lock anything, and stashes are meant for very niche reasons, they
themselves are pretty frowned upon, both methods are really awful last resort/no other way to nicely
hold on to something.

I would highly recommend you get into the habit of caching your geometry out, houdini is built on this
concept, because Maya, Max will stash all the time as you work, but houdini simply re-runs your network.

I know this is tangential to your question, but even if you had the answer why, it's still not a
nice way of working, it really is a last resort to use either.

L

lewis_T
There are various reasons, but I think it's more important to take a step back from this.

You should generally never lock anything, and stashes are meant for very niche reasons, they
themselves are pretty frowned upon, both methods are really awful last resort/no other way to nicely
hold on to something.

I would highly recommend you get into the habit of caching your geometry out, houdini is built on this
concept, because Maya, Max will stash all the time as you work, but houdini simply re-runs your network.

I know this is tangential to your question, but even if you had the answer why, it's still not a
nice way of working, it really is a last resort to use either.

L

Thanks for the reply. Stashes are used internally for a lot of the non-procedural hair nodes. Its pretty helpful to stash a few kilobytes worth of curves especially if the network takes a long time to compute.

Yes, and in those nodes the overhead is very low, or acceptable.
I was more referring to your example, stashing a heavily subD'd bit of geometry.


L

While lewis_T is absolutely right, that is an interesting observation that I do not know the answer to. I would recommend submitting it as a question to SideFX support. It might take a few days to hear back because of Siggraph.

Oh and if your issue is time taken to read from a disk for multiple frames, it might help to use a cache SOP after a filecache node, setting the display flag and then running through your frame range so that it is cached to memory for that Houdini session. Not sure if that is helpful for you in your use case, but it's a trick I only learned recently

Liesbeth_Levick
While lewis_T is absolutely right, that is an interesting observation that I do not know the answer to. I would recommend submitting it as a question to SideFX support. It might take a few days to hear back because of Siggraph.

Oh and if your issue is time taken to read from a disk for multiple frames, it might help to use a cache SOP after a filecache node, setting the display flag and then running through your frame range so that it is cached to memory for that Houdini session. Not sure if that is helpful for you in your use case, but it's a trick I only learned recently

Thanks, good info. I was making an hda and I was trying to decide between stashing a few kilobytes worth of geo or embedding a bgeo.sc in the hda.