Rendering lots of points with attributes

[Dubbie99]

Is there currently a workflow that will let me cook points to an alembic and then render them as points without unpacking them?
I am doing millions of bubbles with the foam shader. But I need velocity and pscale.
Leaving them packed means I have no velocity or scale. but unpacking them means that they have to be written to vrscenes for rendering.

This is kind of critical to be honest. We have a lot of shots like this coming up.

[glacierise]

PScale and v are accessed by the renderer at render time. You can't manipulate them after writing them to the alembic, but the renderer does use them. Usually I use the IPR with the geometry before writing alembic, and find good values, then write the alembic and render the frames.

[Dubbie99]

Hrm. I tried the packed alembic but it just renders black. I needed to unpack it before it would render. Maybe I need to investigate closer. I wasn’t doing anything to it at all after unpacking. It is literally one alembic read node.

[Dubbie99]

Ok, I see where the problem is now. If I apply a standard VRay shader to my points, they render fine as a packed alembic.
If I apply the foam shader I get nothing.

Hope this helps!

[glacierise]

That's interesting, if the foam shader does anything that would cause it? The devs could shed some light on it

[bdancer]

That's not yet implemented...
Could you pls send me a test setup so I could verify the upcoming implementation?

[Dubbie99]

Sent you mail.