Hello,

Houdini Indie 18.0.499

I have a heavy static mesh with 130 8k UDIMs.
When i open Render View and render (Mantra), the scene takes about 5 mins to calculate all the data.
The render itself takes about 8 seconds. (in this case.)
When i frame-forward, Render View renders the next frame in 8 seconds. Etc for any other frame.
When i render the Mantra node to disk, it re-calculates the geometry on every frame.
So, 20 hours to render to disk vs. 32 minutes to manually click through every frame and save the Render View buffer to disk.

I've tried using IFDs (with Save Inline Geometry off), a Stash node, a Cache node (caching only 1 frame), i've tried locking the final SOP node in my chain, i've tried packing the geometry, i've tried setting the Cache Frames to 1 on the File SOP loading the data, i've tried increasing the Cache Memory Ratio to a percentage value large enough to encompass the scene on the Mantra/Rendering/Render tab…
None of those work; Mantra still reloads all the data on every frame. (And i've tried Redshift, but it crashes Hou to the desktop in an empty scene when i open the Redshift render view…maybe a .499 issue?)

So what am i missing? How can i instruct Mantra save-to-disk to just render the data it already has in memory?

Any help is much appreciated. I'm over here setting the Render View Toggle Auto Save timer to nSeconds and hitting the forward arrow hundreds of times…

Maybe try changing the Load type in the cache node or the file node to “packed disk primitive”.
File Cache (node)-> Load from file-> Load->packed disk primitive
File (node)-> load-> packed disk primitive.

Not sure if it will work in your situation.
Good luck.