Instances high load time

[Meet]

Octane has a long instances load time once the instances go over 2-3 million.
By load time I mean, it takes almost a minute to load 10mil instances of a cube in the IPR. I tried using the string instance attribute as well as packing copy to points, same results.

This doesn't happen in 3Delight, a CPU render engine or from what my friend told me, in redshift.

Is this an octane limitation?
or is this because I am using an old version of octane (Octane 2021.1.1.1 - January 2022 build) and some recent instance changed were implemented that I am missing?
The file crashes as well after refreshing the IPR.

I am using Octane 2021.1.1.1

[juanjgon]

Let me take a look at it to check where is the bottleneck ...

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[juanjgon]

Ok. I've found the bottleneck in the instances scene extraction code. The next plugin build should be at least x3 times faster while extracting packed geo instances and up to x10 faster while extracting instances from the s@instance attribute or while using the Instance OBJ node.

What I don't know is the origin of the rendering error. I'll ask the core devs about it.

Anyway, if you are trying to render particle systems with small particles, you should think about using the Octane native particles feature, which is a lot faster and supports more particles into a single OBJ node.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[Meet]

Thank you, Juanjo

I do know rendering the particles as sphere primitives is pretty fast and stable, but here sphere isn't the best shape when you want different reflections from the particles, say, to get a glitter like effect.

One more question, I recently saw octane 2022 XB1 was released and it mentions "Added Vectron primitives: Box, Capsule, Cylinder, Prism, Sphere, Torus, Tube". Does this mean instead of just the sphere primitive on particles, we can choose between these shapes in future?

[juanjgon]

I'm not sure yet, to be honest. We have just got the SDK to implement all these features on the plugins. I'll work on the 2022.1 XB1 build over the next two/three weeks to try to have the first release as soon as possible.

BTW, the core devs say that the error that you get means that Octane failed to allocate memory during the geometry compilation. When you run out of system memory it is very hard to recover from that so the best is to restart, hence the error message y probably the Houdini freeze/crash. Have you tried to configure your Windows paging file to use a fixed size file at least twice the size of your available system CPU RAM?

Thanks,
-Juanjo