Atoms cache

In Atoms you can save your simulation on disk using Atoms caches, then it is possible to reuse these caches with the "cacheReader" behaviour module. The Atoms Cache is lightweight and fast and it can increase the performance of your scene.

With the cache reader and the agents layout tool you can edit and tweak your cache.

Exporting a cache

You can open the cache exporter GUI using the shelf button or via the Atoms Menu: Atoms > Export > Cache Exporter

You can select one or more agent groups from the left list, then you can move them to cache list on the right by pressing the arrow button.
You can have multiple agent groups under each cache, to rename a cache just double click on its name and type the new name.
To add an agent group to a cache make sure to have the cache selected before pressing the arrow button.
To create a new cache from an agent group selection make sure you have no cache selected before pressing the arrow button.

There also few other options:

Cache Path: the path were the caches are going to be saved. Each cache will saved in a separate sub folder.
Start/End frame
Multithread: to be used for high number of agents
Compress: compress each cache file
Random Access Compress: compress each agent in the file. Best if you are planning to read randomly the agents keeping the benefit of compression; for instance, if you will time offset agents singularly later on.
Use Skin bounding box: uses the skin mesh to store bounding box data inside the cache. Please note having this option on could be considerably slower if you have heavy skin meshes.

Cache Exporter

The cache exporter will export four files per frame:

header: basic info such as number of agents at the current frame, number of created agents and number of deleted agents
frame: agent data such as agent type, position, velocity, bbox and variation
meta: agents metadata
pose: agent skeleton data

To make the caches more portable, all the agent type files are saved in a subfolder next to your cache files. The cache will also have a file with no padding containing global infos, such as start frame, end frame, agent ids, etc.

Importing a cache

To import a cache from disk, create a new agent group and then attach a cacheReader module. Form the "cachePath" attribute you can set the cache path. Rewind the scene and atoms will load the cache.