Load time

[YoyoBoy]

I have a scene with many pre-calculated grids in it. I'm finding that the farther I jump into the animation, the longer I have to wait to be able to access the scene. Of course I got around this by making the grids only display when selected. But then the same thing happens when I try to render that frame. I get the impression that behind the scenes its playing the the entire animation of each grid. Is that what's happening? If so, can you just make the grids load only the file for the frame they're on?

Thanks.

[Ivaylo Katev]

this happens only if you have PF system that uses some phoenix operator. if this is not the case, i have no idea what is the problem.

[YoyoBoy]

Nope, no particles. In one scene I have 60 grids that are instances of 7. In another I have 10 that are instanced to 23. I just now found that it loads quicker when I break the instancing. Still pretty slow, though.

No idea if this has anything to do with anything, but for each grid I carefully defined the output/input to a folder created for that grid.

[Ivaylo Katev]

interesting. never tried with so many instances. all they have different simulations, or some of them use the simoutput of other instances?

[YoyoBoy]

The inputs are set to simoutput and the outputs are set to the folder/file. I wonder if it would be quicker if I swapped them, so that the input didn't have to look to see what the output is. I can't play with that right now though.

[Ivaylo Katev]

no, the path parsing in very fast. there is one more thing that can produce the effect, the process of collecting the file names. when a frame is loaded, phoenix collects all the filenames in the input path, and chooses the best one (or two if interpolation is needed) i think it should be very fast, but i'v never measured it.