Rassoul Edji

Thank you all for the suggestions. I've been able to massively improve the performance of the scene using them.

I optimized my primitive matching patterns which helped almost entirely eliminate the cook times, restructured the network so that when making live changes to things like lights, downstream nodes didn't need to be recooked, and setup the render purpose for the geos with proxies that are 1/13th as dense.

Viewport interactivity has gone up massively and cook times for ops have been reduced to 1 second max. FPS went from 9 to 111 with the render purposes set.

There is still a lot to learn about Solaris but this round of optimization has at least made my scene workable. I'm sure I can optimize it even further as I learn.

If you have any resources for optimizing and working with huge production scenes in Solaris then please do share.

Thanks again for your insights!

That is a great tip regarding the viewport masks and visibility, very useful. However, although it does increase performance it makes me run into another issue - Hiding pieces of the helicopter for better performance also hides them in the render. I still want the render to render everything in the scene, but the viewer to for example, only show the helicopters fuselage for better performance instead of loading in all 7000 objects.

In Katana the viewport overrides do exactly that, they allow you to hide and view the things you want to work with but when you render something it renders everything in your node graph. The scene itself and the viewport are separate.

I guess this is just a shortcoming of the whole Hydra viewport/rendering setup as opposed to having a separate system for renders and viewers, you can't really detach the two processes?

I guess what I can do is setup different view masks for different things. One which is just a few objects for quick working and then the load all option for when I want to view and render everything and then switch between them while I work. It's not ideal but it does definitely get the job done.

To answer your question about the environment, there is currently no environment loaded in. Just the two helicopters. That's the main reason I am worried about the performance, this is about 25% of the entire scene so I need to figure out performance optimizations if I hope to be able to handle the full production scene.

I can share the scene but not the geo in the scene as they are production assets.

I have had teammates test the scene and the issue is still there for them too. Also, my machine is very high end so it's not an issue of an underpowered machine or anything like that.