[Rico]

I ran into an issue I just now noticed. I created an animation and some effects in 3ds Max a while back. I opened up the file a and ran the simulation. It ran smooth as can me. I had particles with all sorts of forces and a simple character animation along with it too.

With Houdini.... if I work with an animation or even with effects (simply ones might I add) it lags really bad. So, I can't really see what's going on. I know that with 3ds max it would take about 30 seconds longer for the first simulation and then when it loops around it gets faster... but that doesn't seem to happen in Houdini.

Is there an option I can change or is there anything I can do with the software to have my simulations run smoother? I have 2gigs of ram and I don't seem to have this issue with max or maya.

[dante]

for particles, try putting down a cache sop after your popnet node. for character animation, you can try increasing the object cache size in the preferences.

[Ricardo_F]

For particles, Houdini doesn't automatically do caching or a "history'" if you will, so can't scrub the scene. What you have to do is, like dante said, is use a cache sop after the pops to cache your particles.

But, for your specs, since you seem to have low ram, if you're doing something with lots of particles, I'd write them out as bgeos and read them back in, with this option you can also change back the particles and all the point stuff.

For DOP stuff, for your ram count, you're not gonna get away with being able to cache your sim to ram, since you'll get Memory Allocation Errors all over the place, so you're just gonna have to write that out, and that won't be very fast for playback.

So you will experience some kind of lag in one way or another, it's just the way Houdini is right now.