by juanjgon » Fri Jul 24, 2020 3:28 pm
juanjgon
Fri Jul 24, 2020 3:28 pm
The vdb cache file is small, but the volume grid is not small, it has [759, 286, 678] voxeles!
The extraction of the Houdini "vdb" primitives can be indeed very slow. This is a limitation that comes from the internal HDK functions used to sampling the volume data and the fact that we must sample each voxel to build the Octane internal volume structure. The Houdini "volume" primitives are indeed a lot faster, because the HDK functions used to extract the data are also a lot faster. I'll take a look at it to check if something has changed in the latest Houdini version that can be used to improve the "vdb" primitives extraction time.
In any case, Octane can load the OpenVDB files itself from the core, at the render time, and like happens with other renderers this is in fact the best available workflow to work with volumes. If you are going to work on a project with a lot of volumes, you should think about using OpenVDB as cache files and configure Octane to use these files to render them.
Thanks,
-Juanjo