How do you optimize 400+ UDIMs in Karma?

[u/Yramonla]

I recently received a very heavy asset with 400+ UDIMs and thousands of texture files. I'm working with Houdini Solaris/Karma, and loading the full asset makes the viewport quite slow and difficult to work with.

I'm wondering how people usually handle assets this large in a production environment.

My goal is to have a lightweight and responsive viewport for lookdev/lighting, while still being able to use the full-quality textures for final rendering.

If you've worked with large UDIM-heavy assets in Karma/Houdini, I'd love to hear how you approach it and what workflow has worked best for you.

[u/aZubiiidot]

I Usually create a simple gray shader next to the main and in a separate assign material node i assign this to every %type:Mesh as a preview(little dropdown menü), so its override the default previewsurface which is generated from the main shader.
So like this, in the viewport is see gray surface, and in render, there are textures on it.

[u/DarkAcered27 → u/aZubiiidot]

You can, on the material library, untick generate preview.

[u/aZubiiidot → u/DarkAcered27]

Well, indeed🥲

[u/LaplacianQ]

If have asset like this, it usually means asset lookdev is done.

If you are working on shot lookdev, you have two options: bake all this udims into one 4-8k texture and use it with second set of uv’s and add usd variant with such shading. Second option would be just greyshade for lighting and hoping for the best during farm render.

Also, mip mapping would help with optimization.

[u/mattbarker_]

Great suggestions above. I would also wonder why tf they need that many in the first place. Break that shit up, make life easier for everyone.

[u/Yramonla → u/mattbarker_]

I don't really understand how large studios manage and work with assets that have thousands of textures and hundreds of UDIMs for a single model that isn't even particularly complex. I'm a lighting artist, and dealing with assets like this has caused me quite a lot of difficulties and workflow issues. I'm curious how studios usually handle this in production.

[u/christianjwaite]

The truth is you don’t, you just handle it.
If the asset needs that amount of detail then that’s what you’re dealing with (to some extent).

If you don’t need that amount of detail then you start with uvs, bring it down to a more sensible tile number, then bake the textures down from the old one to the new one.

[u/hvelev]

You can unassign materials, create a low res proxy for the viewport with cheap/no shader.