A big challenge I had this week was converting the large flip cache to USD for use on the farm. USD ROPs would fail due to running out of RAM. The solution is to cache the USD data per frame and use a USD stitch clips ROP to create a template file that can be sub layered into the scene graph.
Cache USD per Frame
It was undoubtedly more difficult than it should have been to find info on this workflow but here it is.
- Add $F4 into your output file name.
- Enable Flush Data After Each Frame
- Disable Track Primitive Existence
This setup prevents Time Sampling from occurring in memory during caching and just writes out the USD data per frame to an individual file. Next run your output USD files through a usdstitchclips ROP to create a value clip of the cache. This creates a Time Sampled template file that will reference the cache frame file into the scene with greater efficiency than recooking the scene graph each frame.
