[Rico]

What does it mean to writing geometry to disk? I saw this in a tutorial and looked it up in the help file but couldn't find an explanation. What are the advantages of doing this?

[CaptainHammy]

Writing geometry to disk allows you to store the result of of some operation. You can write out the result geometry from a giant modeling network, the particles from your simulation, dynamics objects, etc. Basically once you have something locked down you can write it out and it's there available any time without having to deal with cooking of network chains, simulation, etc.

[stevetwist]

As CaptainHammy said, you're storing the data generated by a series of operations out to disk, so that you can bring that data back in simply by reading a file, rather than re-cooking the network that generated the data.

The advantages come from not recooking the network to access the data. This will be both significantly faster and use a lot less memory. Also, since the data is now just files on your harddisk, you can back them up (keeping versioned back-ups of network experimentation, for example), transfer them to other artists, bring them back in for other projects... the possibilities really are endless.

The only disadvantage is that you lose the ability to modify the network in order to change the data... but this doesn't have to be the case. You can keep your network, but simply not cook it by having a File SOP (or the equivalent for other contexts) as the visible node. That way, you can always get back to the network, recook, and resave the data out to disk - bringing it back in with the File SOP, whenever you want to make changes to the network.

I used a similar workflow on a recent project consisting of 100s of detailed models (thus complicated networks creating them). In order to quickly cook the entire scene, and to save (drastically) on the scene's memory footprint, I baked each object out to geometry on the disk, and brought it back in with a File SOP. However, I still kept the networks, so whenever I needed to make a change, I'd alter the network, re-bake out, and then reload the geometry back in.

Hope that helps clarify your question,
Steve

[Rico]

Thanks for the response guys. My scenes have been kind of lagging and was trying to find a way to to keep it from doing that. I'm not sure exactly how it works but I wrote out my geometry (just a single piece of geometry) and my scene seems to be faster.

Also, I cached out my scene and now I'm able to see what's going on. I don't know much about caching (or if I'm even using it right) nor do I know much about writing out my scene but seems to be working great the way I did it. Where would I be able to find more information on these topics? I would love to read up on them.

p.s. would be a great "how do I" or introductory video

[stevetwist]

Originally Posted by Rico

p.s. would be a great "how do I" or introductory video

It's actually covered as part of the TD Volume 1/2 DVDs where we bake out the bouncing-ball audience to disk (I believe as part of volume 1... but I'm not 100% certain, it's been a while since I worked on that project ).

Steve

[Ricardo_F]

Originally Posted by Rico

Where would I be able to find more information on these topics? I would love to read up on them.

Pressing F1 would help, since it actually works now(for the most part).

[Rico]

Originally Posted by stevetwist

It's actually covered as part of the TD Volume 1/2 DVDs where we bake out the bouncing-ball audience to disk (I believe as part of volume 1... but I'm not 100% certain, it's been a while since I worked on that project ).

Steve

Wow, I'm going to have to look into this.