[Bf-committers] GSOC 2019 - viewport caching - Idea proposal

[Luciano A. Muñoz Sessarego]

First, congratulations everyone on the Annie award and on all the years of
hard work, at my current job i got animators crying to learn blender (which
i'll help them with), it makes me very proud to be part of this community
and see how far it's gone, cant imagine where it'll take us.

Okay so GSOC proposal.

*VIewport caching for animation playback.*


   - *Benefits*: Giving animators the tools to make animation better and
   faster, the faster you can see in the viewport, the more you can iterate,
   the more you can iterate the better you can work, the more you can improve.
   Directly the benefit to the users is playing one or several characters
   in realtime in the viewport even if they are heavy in polygons, this with
   the power of the workbench engine for visualization will reduce the ammount
   of "playblasts" made while doing animation and also give the possibility to
   see what's going on around the character not only in the one perspective
   where the playblast is made from. This will hugely improve the animation
   workflow, I think at the end of the day what every animator wants is rigs
   that play realtime every time.

   - *Description*: for the user in the viewport basically there should be
   just a button to turn on and off, with a sub-button to flush cache in case
   that's needed. It should basically work like the prefetch that is being
   done for the vse, with a bar drawn in the timeline describing what frames
   have been cached.

   - *Requirements*: should be non intrusive and automatic, (the idea is
   not to add extra steps or work for the user, but on the contrary make it as
   invisible as possible) it would happen in the background and with optional
   way to "force" recaching for when that's necessary.

   - *Difficulty*: One of the main difficulty and concerns is that if i
   move a part of the rig the cache doesnt get invalidated completely, just
   the affected frames, in example i have 100 frames and i tweak an eye of my
   character that only affects 5 frames of the timeline, after i let go the
   eye control those 5 frames should be recached not the entire range of
   frames.

   - *Possible mentors*: i guess sybren could be the ideal mentor since
   he's been working other kinds of caching (?)

To finalize, this idea has been around the industry for years, Premo
(dreamworks animation software) has this same system since pre how to train
your dragon time ~2014, pixar's presto also features it via their USD and
its render engine Hydra, and maya 2019 recently acquired this feature
(that's when i first got a taste hands on of it), and for the animation
process it is a game changer.

all my love,

L

Luciano A. Muñoz Sessarego

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