ChrisCousins

Ah thanks for that advice - I didn't know that about packed disk sequences.

Using Redshift on this one - tried RSProxies and building the instancefile as a string... but it got really fiddly, didn't let me override materials for some reason and gave me no editor feedback.

Disk sequences worked well enough this time but I'll give Alembics a go on the next one.

Hi - hope someone can help. I've got some animated foliage (cactus spikes) that I want to scatter over a large area. There's 16 variants, and approx 5,000 spikes.
I want to control the animation with a falloff, so the spikes open and close in waves.

First thought - Alembic Delayed Load! Perfect. Variant attribute is saved nicely, copy to points works great - and using setprimintrinsic(0, "abcframe", @primnum, @retime, "set") to control time. However, this causes glitching and error issues - there's aggressive caching and the instances aren't responding correctly.

So... packed disk sequences. Great - using setprimintrinsic(0, "index", @primnum, targetFrame); I can control the frame with an attribute.
However, when loading the geo is treated as one object, and I can't use the variant attribute. It places all 16 animations on each of the 5000 points.

So the question - is there a way to instance packed disk sequences respecting a variant attribute, and allow for control of time? Or should I save the 16 variations as individual sequences and load them that way?

Fixed! By watching the MPM masterclass, which is super-helpful by the way.
The missing checkbox was this one, which watches out for particles creeping through the collider, exactly what I wanted.