I am experimenting with some changes to our scene structure, merging a lot more geometry into single meshes. This is a nice performance improvement, but workflow wise it’s a little less convenient.
Some of the issues I run into seem intrinsic to the design ( and I assume is what makes it so much faster ) like the inability to hide subsets.
However, I also noticed there is little tooling around geo subsets, for example, the ability to highlight the faces in a group to check the membership would help me a lot. I have not been able to find a tool or dcc that allows me to do this.
I am hoping I am missing something here, does anyone have tips one debugging or just working with subsets?
no, there’s not alot of tooling around GeomSubsets yet
we are supportive of making GeomSubsets Imageable, which would allow them to be vised/invised, and possibly more “easily” highlightable, but…
Can you break down where you’re seeing the key performance wins in mesh-collapsing? If we start getting fancier with Subset capabilities, more of the performance wins on the Hydra side evaporate, though UdsStage cost savings (mainly prim count) would remain
to start with 3, this exploration started with Paolo Selva’s tests with the caldera data set.
We have a lot of “world geometry” which ends up being a geom on it’s own. Often this is just a single quad and in some “prefabs” I found there to be 120,000 of them. Collapsing these 120k quads into a a big polysoup with geom subsets seem to make many dcc’s much happier. In this case I assign the material at conversion time in code, but I realized if you would do this interactively, you’d need a way to see what you are actually assigning to, I think that would be my main request, a way to highlight the included faces.
Ah, I see - so from those 120K faces in one happy Mesh, you’d only be creating a “small” number of Subsets based on bound Material? I definitely see the big wins there, both at the Stage and Hydra levels.
Please file an Issue referencing this thread… Storm is capable of highlighting faces, but there’s missing glue and logic to tie that to Subset selection, and figure out whether that should be an “always on” behavior, etc.
