Houdini USDrender Output processing


Hey!

Lots of data is piling up in the work folder every time we render,

I believe this is a temporary storage which needs for before rendering, any reason why this was changed from $HOUDINI_TEMP_DIR ?

or should there be a logic where it needs to be deleted when render is done?

I believe houdini temp dir is local - whereas on the farm you want access to it from all machines.

This USD file it writes, is the file that goes into the renderer.
If those are heavy files, you’re setting up your scenes wrong I’d say.
The export process should really just be the ‘lighting’ scene that happens to just reference some input files. It should not be generating heavy amount of data because your ‘render’ solaris graph should be configured in such a way that it’d just be loading in data mostly. No?

or should there be a logic where it needs to be deleted when render is done?

If your data storage is precious/costly, and for whatever reason these files are big for you (which again, they should not be!) then sure - you can set up a post render cleaning process.

If those are heavy files, you’re setting up your scenes wrong I’d say.

I agree with you. There were cases where the lighting team had to tweak the mesh(like remapping the attributes for AOVs, etc.). They loaded it via sopimport; this is making us export USD again when rendering. We are working on the solution for it by making a USD file cache in the lighting scene.

you can set up a post render cleaning process
Thanks, this was implemented.

Not sure what type of remapping this is - but if you can I’d really investigate whether anything of this sort that requires to happen in the Lighting/render scene can somehow be shifted to be some multiplier instead on render attributes, like materials or other things. But yeah, depends on the type of thing that needs it.

Thanks, this was implemented.

Where did you implement this, if I may ask.