[Bf-cycles] 2.66 plans

[Matt Ebb]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 7:11 PM, Brecht Van Lommel <
brechtvanlommel at pandora.be> wrote:

> Right. I think auto dicing to get a certain face size rather than
> subdivision level still has some use for displacement, but it can be
> done in a modifier too.
>

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but one problematic issue that both Blender
Internal and Cycles have is that because the renderer is launched from
within Blender, there needs to be two copies of the geometry in memory.
Maybe this is less of an issue for subdivisions if blender can destroy the
high res tessellated mesh after transferring to cycles, but it's still an
issue. In film production this process is usually decoupled, with separate
render farm jobs exporting scene description files such as RIBs vs
renderer-only jobs which load those scene description files and any
associated dynamic/procedural geometry (eg. alembic files and such),
without the host 3d application, so there's no duplication of memory.

While having an scene description file format for cycles would be cool for
other reasons, perhaps a middle ground approach would be to have better
support for geometry formats such as alembic in both blender and cycles, so
that alembic geo can be represented in blender as a low res proxy and kept
out of memory, but at render time loaded up by the renderer natively, in
the renderer executable. Anyway, I'm not sure if this is a huge issue for
cycles or cycles' target audience, but just putting it out there.

cheers
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