2018.26450 - Kantan slows cooking with geo instanced texture

TD 099, 2018.26450, Windows 10

I’ve found a performance bug in Kantan Mapper

The setup starts with a replicated Base TOP that is used as instanced textures on geometry. The base has a switch inside to flip a constant color. The switch is referenced from a master control, so when the control is changed, all replicated TOPs change their color.

The render of all this geo is put onto a single rectangle in Kantan.

When the master control is now changed, the cook time goes up drastically.

In the performance monitor, the slowdown shows that Kantan is cooking it’s inputs repeatedly for each texture instance.

Digging into Kantan, it seems like this is because of a live reference to the resolution of the texture.

If you go here: kantanMapper / project / tools / textureEdit / screen

There is an info chop grabbing live data from the null of the texture. This is apparently recooking after every geometry instance.

I’ve found a fix for this. Instead of the info node getting piped to other nodes, I’ve inserted a Null node into the stream. When that null is set to Selective Cook Type, Kantan stops recalculating everything for each instance.

I’ve probably explained that poorly, so I’ve attached an example file.
kantan instance.toe (4.25 MB)

Great improvement!

will be in an upcoming build.

Best
Markus

Great, thanks!