Jason Iversen

Hi again,

Well, I never had the time to do this myself. But with the rise of Claude, this become quite possible to experiment with, so I took a couple of days to push around a basic tool

Intercepting Houdini proper seemed very hard to do, so I thought perhaps there could be a LOPs-only approach that might have a more constrained set of use cases maybe? So going off this idea, here is a (toy) node that opens fires up render delegates and pushes the images to the headset.



There is the source code for it: https://github.com/jason-iversen/houdini-xr [github.com]
I recommend reading the README for more info on what it can do, and some technical details. Please feel free to (get Claude to) fork it and do whatever you like with it.

I'm open to suggestions or feedback, happy to experiment further.

EbenF

jason_iversen
In the studio however, doing this for our render farm might save quite a bit more time

Hello! I think precompile is only useful in an interactive session, not in a render farm context.
regards,
F.

Hiya,

Certainly one could argue Karma shaders still compile quite quickly and might not be worth a shared-cache/precompiling on the farm - especially when rendering hero characters and FX - but when you're talking about hundreds or thousands of materials in larger layout scenes, it might help to save some minutes per-frame across multiple frames on a farm.

FYI, we already successfully cache shader compilations for our other renderer (Manuka) on our farm, where big shaders can sometimes take (many) minutes to compile and optimize. So this is area is pretty well understood for us already and it would hopefully be quite trivial to add Karma alongside our preexisting shader cache system.

While I'm a fan of making things faster, I feel that compiling things I'm using just-in-time is probably absolutely fine for my home usage, considering my Mtlx library coverage in my average shader is fairly small.

In the studio however, doing this for our render farm might save quite a bit more time. Has there been much more thought to allowing us to customize the destination of these cache files to shared network disk (using lock-files/etc) so we can do can accumulate compiled code, and/or do a complete precompile upon installation/driver change? Perhaps as a cron which would mostly just NOP until it detected a change.

In short, I'll re-run on a (medium-grade: 32-core Threadripper) workstation and report the performance instead.

It took 55 mins. It might be nice to have an estimated total (eLapsed + Left), and a summary at the end?