Hello guys.
Just wanted to check with others.
Going from H17.0.416 to H17.0.459 and any above versions, including H17.5 we do see huge speed regression in reading and working with Alembic files.
Loading same Alembic takes cca 4-10x longer, dropping and connecting empty nodes (atwrangle, nulls) invokes cooking of alembic and takes up to 150s to drop and connect null nodes.
This is not happening in any version bellow H17.0.416
Setting alembic to load as unpacked will fix the slow downs, but we cant render unpacked alembics in our pipeline.

this whole thing forced us to revert back to H16.0

Anyone else experiencing this? alembic im testing it on is nothing huge (2.700 packed alembics)

I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary. I see the occasional corruption of the gpu vertex ordering, but I don't know what version I started seeing that.

I don't really work with alembics that enormous though. Usually only a few shapes max, (mostly characters). The occasional vehicle model may have a few hundred pieces though.

Are you seeing issue with playback of animated alembics, or just the initial load of the file?

Hello.
Thank you for the reply.
i do see it everywhere. Loading alembic, then working with alembics (adding any nodes after alembic) even rendering on farm.
Our pre-process times went from minutes to hours.

yep experienced same thing (submitted bug about it). One strange note.. if you copy/read abc file off a local drive then it's back to being scrubble. Reading off network drive it can take up to a minute to refresh. At first I thought it was our network but there's a definite difference between houdini builds.

Anecdotally, I've noticed this as well, but haven't had the bandwidth to test.

G

We are having difficulty reproducing this. A .hip file that reliably reproduces the poor performance would be very helpful in tracking down the problem.

Thank you guys.
For us it's happening with any alembic.
I tested it with local drive when we first noticed it. It's definitely little faster (ssd vs 10gb Ethernet link) but not even close to being usable.
Strange that this bug is lasting for such a long time as it made houdini unusable in production

martinkindl83
For us it's happening with any alembic.

Could you please share an example .hip? None of the Alembic archives we have looked at so far exercise the problem.

A bug likely responsible for this was fixed for Houdini 17.5.237 (and Houdini 17.0.562).

Thank you derrick. I was super busy at work and had no time to upload abc. I will test it asap.

Thank you derrick.
I can confirm that it fixed the issue, we were having.