Mantra delayed load instancing works pretty well for simple animated crowd instancing. What if I wanted to implement something like sequence blend, in a Mantra procedura, to smoothly blend between different sets of delayed load geometryl? If I understand correctly, massive implements something like sequence blend using a dso. (I could be wrong, I've never used massive) What would the steps be to generate something like that in houdini?

I was looking at the mantra program procedural as a possible solution, but the documentation for that is really sparse. Could python be used as a program procedural? and I saw the default values for the program procedural run gconvert and send it to stdout. Is that how it works… the program procedural receives the geometry from stdout?

after some further research, I found that this could probably be done with an hscript procedural. However, the hscript procedural is quite slow.

So, a faster solution would be to create my own standalone C++ program to blend the geometry, right? Are there any other alternatives? And, would I need the HDK for something like that?