Instance export to ORBX

[spectacle]

Thanks for the great plugin. I noticed that I can instance and render particles no problem inside the Houdini plugin, but once I try to export to .orbx it takes an unworkable amount of time. I have scenes with millions of particles. Is this something that can be fixed in the future or is it a limitation of using Alembic for export?
-
Dave

[juanjgon]

I think that this problem comes from the fact that you are trying to store a huge amount of information, in this case, millions of particles, inside a single animated .orbx file. Probably the file is becoming really large and hard to update while exporting the information. What happens if you export a single frame or a small frame range?

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[spectacle]

Hi Juanjo,

Yeah if I export an orbx with a small amount of particles it's fine. But the export time gets unworkable when I'm using the amount of particles I want to render. It renders fine as an image sequence from the plugin. But ideally I'd be able to export to orbx for RNDR. etc. Is this something that could ever be fixed, or is it just a limitation of the .orbx workflow?

Thanks!

[juanjgon]

I think that this is a physical limitation while working with huge files. As far as I know, the proxy scenes of all other renderers are not animated, exporting a single file for each frame, probably because they are also facing this kind of problem. A multi-frame file from a production level scene could need to store hundreds of GB into a single file, so opening it to add the next frame can be a nightmare for both the renderer and the file system.

Are you exporting the file to a local SSD disk or to a network drive? Maybe exporting large .orbx files to a fast local drive could help.

Thanks,
-Juanjo