Houdini
Rendering huge Houdini meshes in V-Ray.
I’m working on a production right now that involves sending absolutely enormous animated meshes (6.5 million polygons on average with a changing point count every frame) out of Houdini and into Maya for rendering. Normally it would be best to just render everything directly out of Houdini, but sometimes you don’t have as many Houdini licenses (or artists) as you’d like so you have to make do with what you have.
If the mesh were smaller, or at least not animated, I’d consider using the Alembic format since V-Ray can render it directly as a VRayProxy, but for a mesh this dense animating over a long sequence, the file sizes would be impossibly huge since Alembics can’t be output as sequences. Trying to load an 0.5 TB Alembic over a small file server between 20 machines trying to render the sequence and you can see why Alembic might not be ideal for this kind of situation.
Hit the jump below to see the solution.
(more…)