Texture Load Time?

[bollella]

Hi All,
I'm relatively new to Octane (redshift refugee). I work with Houdini 21, MacOS, Apple Silicon.

I just started porting a scene from Redshift to Octane. It's a pretty simple object (A Japanese Torii Gate). I have one material with 10 UDIMs, so about 50 texture files. When I start an IPR render it takes quite a bit of time to load those textures. Are there any optimizations I'm missing? The Torii will be one object in a larger scene so I wouldn't want to have to wait for all those textures to load for every IPR start.

I guess I could just apply some basic materials to the various pieces of the Torii with approximate colors just for look dev but it would be nice to have the actual textures.

I thin Redshift actually created optimized versions of textures and caches them. Anything similar for Octane?

Also, I won't be changing these textures during the scene building. Can I bake them in somehow?

Thanks!!

Greg