Hello, I am having some issues with getting houdini to handle .sim files. I can open them up and get them to display the way I want now, however if I want to scrub to a specific frame it takes an age! The further into the animation the longer it takes. It's almost like it's cooking everything out again from scratch. The first few frames load reasonably quickly but anything after that is absurd. I literally just spent 35 min opening a file with nothing in it but a dop node containing a file node to read in my .sim file and a geo node with a dop I/o… Is this normal? It seems a little ludicrous to me. I have 12 cores@ 4.2GHz and 48gb of ram working on a simpleish smoke and particle sim.

Thanks in advance for your posts

What is file size of your .sim files?
.sim files save all the simulation (dop) data to resume simulation if something bad happens. That's why it generates larger file size and takes more time to write those to disk. It have some unnecessary attributes which you don't need for rendering but for continuing sim.

.sim is not preferred way to write out dop data for rendering.
If you are not worried about simulation failure. Then go for .bgeo.

And use .gz to compress file to save some disk space.
like mygeo.bgeo.gz

Okay I will try this out! Thanks a lot

Works like a charm!

Thanks again PradeepBarau