oh blimey.

[super gnu]

alembic files with particles in are rather chunky arent they?

im doing a small test sand sim in houdini. exporting 240 frames to alembic.

its done 10 frames and the alembic is already 3gb.

so.. 72 gb for 240 frames.

i was planning on doing something -much- larger scale..

i think i will be shipping a hard disk to the renderfarm.. i dont think my internet connection is quite up to it!

[vlado]

Try converting them to .vrmesh files afterwards; more often than not, .vrmesh files tend to be smaller. Although large numbers of particles will still take some space... Generally speaking, there are very efficient compression methods for particles specifically (we use those in the PhoenixFD caches, for example) and it might make sense to port them to .vrmesh files too at some point.

Best regards,
Vlado

[super gnu]

do i use "plytovrmesh" to do that?

i like the sound of compression for particles! im amazed that alembic doesnt use compression already (or if it does, its crap!)

maybe there are some options for it in houdini, i am a complete newbie.

[vlado]

ply2vrmesh can convert Alembic files with particles, yes. The only caveat is that you will have to specify the size multiplier of the particles when converting and it's not possible to change it afterwards in the VRayProxy object for the moment.

Best regards,
Vlado

[super gnu]

ok thats fine, i can test and set the final size with the alembic , then convert to proxy before sending to client. is it a large difference in size? my alembic ended up at 73 gb, and its a sim of about a bucketful of sand. (is there a way to see the number of particles im rendering in vray?, ive not found out how to get a number out of houdini yet.)