
"pack geometry" support
Moderator: juanjgon
Packed primitives would be really really amazing. Its such a great way to do extremely complicated layouts for large scenes right now. And the work-flow in Houdini for them is just great.
If octane could support packed primitives it would make quite a few people happy
-t
If octane could support packed primitives it would make quite a few people happy

-t
Any news on the ability to support this? Thanks in advance.
Shane
Shane
Not yet, sorry, study the support of the packed primitives is in my roadmap for this 3.x dev cycle ... anyway packed primitives are something really complex to support in external engines, with a lot of features related to the internal Houdini and Mantra architecture, that are not easy or even useful to be supported by other engines.
Packed prims was designed to load and/or generate geometry at render time. To render a packed primitive in Octane, the plugin is going to need to load, unpack and cook all the underlying data at loading time, because as you can understand Octane can't native render the packed prims. So finally all the benefices of the packed primitives are lost, and the scene loading time can be large than using regular not packed geometry.
From my point of view, support the native .orbx scene files, loaded as proxy objects with instancing support, can be a more useful feature for the plugin to save memory and scene file size.
Anyway I will make some tests and study if load packed primitives can be useful in Octane.
-Juanjo
Packed prims was designed to load and/or generate geometry at render time. To render a packed primitive in Octane, the plugin is going to need to load, unpack and cook all the underlying data at loading time, because as you can understand Octane can't native render the packed prims. So finally all the benefices of the packed primitives are lost, and the scene loading time can be large than using regular not packed geometry.
From my point of view, support the native .orbx scene files, loaded as proxy objects with instancing support, can be a more useful feature for the plugin to save memory and scene file size.
Anyway I will make some tests and study if load packed primitives can be useful in Octane.
-Juanjo
Thanks for that explanation! Seems rather trivial after understanding that. Proxies would be a dream ! Would love to see otoy have robust proxy support throughout the plugins! Anyways thanks again.
Shane
Shane
On a similar note exporting only materials to orbx proxy would be super helpful as well.
Shane
Shane
For the time being can it not treat packed prims as instances? At least for the simple general packed prim workflow. I guess it's possible to do it at the houdini "instance geometry" level but it would be nice if the plugin did it implicitly.
Is that even possible or am I talking non-sense?
Thanks
Yaniv
Is that even possible or am I talking non-sense?

Thanks
Yaniv