Advice on Breaking Up a VFX Shot - DR 15.1

I'm looking for some advice on how to handle a vfx shot I'm doing. Basically I have one shot of an empty street in an abandoned town, and it should be submerged into water. I have created a water "ceiling" using a 3d renderer, a lot of mask shapes, a resolve OFX Light Rays node, a particle generator that generates lots of particles (4000) and two times a Resolve OFX Waviness plugin.

I still have some work on the shot since I need to add some more grunge textures to walls to make it look like nature has transformed it over time.

The problem is that I'm doing this in one fusion composition. Resolve takes about 40 minutes to just open the project (I mean it's stuck for 40 minutes on the loading window after you double click on the project from the project manager), I suspect this is because of the particle generator, when I disable it, the project loads in a minute or two. Is there a better way to do complex compositions such as this one by breaking it up in multiple passes? How would I go about that in Resolve?

I would be nice if Resolve's caching would work, but in my case when the frames are cached, it only plays it back at around 12fps.

Also, I see that Resolve is not using the full potential of my computer. When using Fusion in Resolve my CPU is only used for about 50%, and GPU same.

Tech spects: VFX Shot composition is 4.6k, Resolve timeline resolution is HD 24fps.

Have you tried opening the shot in Fusion Standalone ?

This is one of my fears with Fusion in Resolve, they have not yet proven that it can scale with LOTS of VFX work. Fusion Standalone have.

Hi Alan, thanks for the suggestion. But no, I have not tried it yet. I have shot the footage in braw and that's not available in the standalone version as well as the OFX plugins from Resolve. I know I could render them to an intermediate format to test, but that does not solve the OFX plugins used.

But I know what your saying. A month ago I had similar problems and discovered that the standalone version of Fusion performed better and would not lock up for minutes like Resolve does.