I've been building all of the assets for what will be a pretty heavy scene, asset wise.
So far, so good... time to 1st pixel with XPU is about 2 seconds on a pretty decent machine. This same setup in OBJ made redshift fall over, even with making all of the geo RS proxies.
But I'm about to start adding more hero / complex / simulations / animations and want to be sure I'm going about this right.
1. Load all of the geo. I've got almost everything that isn't a sim built and textured and loaded as a reference. (handy hint here: if you texture in Substance Painter it does a great job of spitting out USD files that are ready to reference)
2. I have some textures that are animated and shared across several of the references, and Solaris doesn't seem to like using time based textures in the references, so I used an edit material properties and replaced the textures with /geo/*/newMaterial.$F.png and that worked pretty well.
3. Any additional texture assignments in the mat lib, and a camera lens shader
4. Lights
5. Cameras
6. Render settings
7. USD Render Rop
So before I get crazy with the really heavy elements:
Should I be using bog standard merge nodes for all of the geometry? Each ref has a proper entry in the tree, and that will continue.
I've got the geo broken out by LOD here. Hero, close, medium and far. (thus the 4 different clusters / merges)
While creating most of the USD references I have now directly out of Substance is fast and convenient, these files are not created with payload info. Is there a way to add that in Solaris after the fact?
The following URLs are suuuuper helpful and deep, and I'm posting here so that anyone looking for similar solutions can dig through these as well:
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/performance.html [
www.sidefx.com]
https://lucascheller.github.io/VFX-UsdSurvivalGuide/index.html [
lucascheller.github.io]
But I'm also asking here to see what the folks that have much more technical knowledge that I (pretty much all of you) might be able to give some quick advice on pitfalls and other things you've come across that might be helpful.
thanks!