I was following along the tutorial for blowing away an image. When doing the animation, it really taxes my system. Like, it is unbearably slow. My computer is running 64 bit Windows 7, Nvidia 512 dedicated, AMD quad core so i really didnt think there would be any issues. I am just hoping I missed some setting in Houdini. When I go into “popnet1” and run the simulation without the color information from my image, it runs just fine. But when I go outside that node and run the animation in the particle emitter level, it acts like its doing something really hard. At a birth rate of just 100, it takes about 10 seconds to go through each frame. On top of that, When I go back to frame 1, it doesnt cache the frames at all, it starts all over! Am i doomed? Should I have sprung for a faster card? Thanks for the help.

Could be drivers, I'm not sure how robust Windows7 drivers are for Nivida right now. The clue is that within the POPnet it's fast, but outside with only display changes it's slow.

I recommend using the Performance Monitor, with all options turned on in the Monitor menu. That could shed some light on it.

Cheers,

Peter B

I think there are problems with the expression that gets the color from the image to the points. At some point in version 10 it became unbelievably slow.

Try a previous version of Houdini (9.5) and see if it works. It did for me.

there's an alternative way to color – or colour – your points:

particles get colour from surface
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=15406&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight= [sidefx.com]

thanks go to Jeff aka “Old School” and his example file.

VOPs are your friend.

I assume you are using the pic() from cops inside a point sop to colour the particles (ive not seen the tute). The pic() can be extremely slow even on robust systems.

Wow, thanks for all the tips. I am going to try them all. I really appreciate it. Ill let you know.