I've been working on a scene in Houdini for my students (for a medical visualisation project) and most of it has gone well - all the modelling / shaders / lighting etc, even slowly getting my head around USD in LOPS, but I've got one rather huge problem with the scene - it refuses to render on our renderfarm! The file renders locally on my laptop (32GB RAM, Windows 10) and on the lab PCs (also 32GB RAM, windows 10) but crashes on our renderfarm which has 64GB RAM. Which makes no sense to me or my colleagues! My colleagues and I have rebuilt the scene so that it only has usd files in LOPS (we also tried BGEO), but the only thing that has enabled it to render on the farm is deleting half the geometry (which ruins the look of the scene). We're really hoping that someone here with more knowledge than us could have a look at the scene and maybe offer some ideas about what we've done wrong?
I've tried to clean the scene up a bit, apologies if you find some random floating nodes I missed, or odd notes for my students still in the scene. All the geometry is in SOPS in a node called Geo (with the exception of a path for a camera and virus model to fly along). I have included the usd files that are referenced in LOPS (they can be rebuilt from their nodes in SOPS if you wish). I can't claim anything about the amazing pipeline in LOPS that one of my colleagues made, so my input has been to model the scene and do lookdev. I'm a long way from being a Houdini expert so I'm sorry if there are any basic mistakes (let me know so I can avoid them in future please!)
Googledrive link to the scene [drive.google.com]
Thanks very much
Martin
