Hello,

I don't think I really know the difference between Cooking and Baking or if they are really just the same term used interchangeably.

But I was wondering if I had a planed animation sequence of 10825 frames and that say for the first 400 frames I was satisfied with how everything is set up for those frames including a smoke simulation and separate geometry movement;

Could I just “bake/cook” that range of frames to a file and then ‘import’ it so when I begin working on say frames 400-1000 I don't always have to wait for ‘cook’ times for those first 400 frames?

I've seen some references to (if I remembered correctly) to ROP networks/nodes…but it seemed oriented specificaly to a simulation only. In my case I also have geometry animation running concurrently with the simulation that has no direct relation to the simulation.

So I'm not sure if I find that tutorial again if I will be able to apply it to what I wish to do.

Input is appreciated - Thank you.

You are on the right track to a speedier workflow. I typically have two scenes, one for displaying and rendering my geo sequences and one scene for generating them. Cameras, lights and materials end up in my “render stage” hip file which is essentially a bunch of File nodes reading pre-cooked sims.

From what I know “cooking” is the act of a node getting up to date with where you are on the timeline. Simulations and Solvers need to cook to be time accurate.

“Baking” is a generic term for converting light and procedural materials (which could also include textures) into image map sets (diffuse, ao, spec, bump, normal etc..) that can later be applied to matching geometry to simulate light without having to calculate light.

Hi there.
Yes you can if I understand what you are trying to do…
Simply you can cache your smoke (and other geo if you have) and then import them again in Houdini then use timeshift node and set clamp option to clamp to end, afterwards you will see smoke becomes static after the last frame that you cached so in this case you don't really need to simulate thousands of the frames.
Hope this helps.

Thanks guys.

So Enivob that's clearer now between cooking and baking; Will help in what search terms to use in getting additional sources of info.

And it looks like I will focus on ‘cooking’ rather than ‘baking’, and rendering is not an issue at the moment.

My best option right now seems to be the tut section for references to the elements you mentioned Nima like caching ( which is new to me ) and using the time shift node. Will have to play around with that and see what I can do with it.

I will be searching through the tuts, but if anyone already knows OffHand a specific tut that comes close to what I am doing, or even a reference link to other sources - that is much appreciated.

Thanks Again

Here is a short video tutorial on how to leverage sequences after you have exported them. Using the Time nodes as Nima has mentioned above.
https://vimeo.com/121902177 [vimeo.com]

“Cooking” is a (mostly just Houdini) term to refer to a node that is ‘dirty’ and needs to be updated due to changes in the network.
“Baking” is usually used to describe converting lighting/procedural shading/displacement etc into maps. Using maps instead of this generated data will speed things up and make your interactive scenes lighter and easier to manage.
“Caching” is used to describe writing, usually geometry or sim data, to disk. Final data but also intermediate data while working, again to speed up your workflow.