Instancing workflow? Performance issues.

[glacierise]

Points in the Alembics would be ideal yes, we talked about this before. But Andrei mentioned the issues with that, they still need to put the info (material assignment) of each instance somewhere, plus for the copy to points or instance node to work that alembic needs to be unpacked in Houdini which is the start of our problems....

Yeah, I imagine material assignments could rely on matching attributes on the points, but the copy to points relying on unpacked... Then maybe some geometry shader would solve it but as far as I know v-ray doesn't have these yet.