[Bf-committers] request for 2.49?

[Terrence Vergauwen]

Hi guys,

Don't know if it's too late to ask this at the moment,
but with a simple addition to 2.49, you could make the life of luxrender and
other projects a lot easier.

As you know, we are currently exporting scene data, geometry for objects and
materials to external file(s) for external renderers.
This can get quite slow when users are finetuning a scene's materials, often
needing to relaunch a lot of renders with slow response as the exporter
python script needs to reexport everything.
To work around this we've used some tricks like separating objects and
materials in to separate exports, but this workflow is very complex for most
users.

Would it be possible to add a flag to a blender object's data, a bit like
created/modified timestamps in a filesystem ?
I've already inquired about achieving this on #blendercoders a while ago and
everyone responded that this is'nt currently possible at all.

If blender could set a flag 'modified' or update a 'modified timestamp' on
objects everytime the data is changed we could use this to only export the
changed objects and make everything much more fluent.
I guess this could serve lots of other purposes later on too.

Radiance