Change Details

This patch exposes the Cycles Alembic Procedural through the MeshSequenceCache modifier in order to use and test it from Blender. To enable it, one has to switch the render feature set to experimental and activate the Procedural in the modifier. An Alembic Procedural is then created for each CacheFile from Blender set to use the Procedural, and each Blender object having a MeshSequenceCache modifier is added to list of objects of the right procedural. The procedural's parameters derive from the CacheFile's properties which are already exposed in the UI through the modifier, although more Cycles specific options might be added in the future. As there is currently no cache controls and since we load all the data at the beginning of the render session, the procedural is only available during viewport renders at the moment. When an Alembic procedural is rendered, data from the archive are not read on the Blender side. This is mostly a hack to test the Cycles Alembic procedural until we have a better Blender side mechanism for letting renderers load their own geometry, which will be based on import and export settings on Collections (T68933). Also included in this patch, although it will committed separately, is a setting to always add a cache reader (either a MeshSequenceCache modifier or a Transform Cache constraint) to the objects created from an Alembic archive. This setting is mostly useful to reload every object from the archive when it is updated without having to resort to re-importing the entire scene, but it is also used here to ensure that every object created from Alembic will be rendered through the Procedural. Ref T79174, D3089 Depends on D10196

This patch exposes the Cycles Alembic Procedural through the MeshSequenceCache modifier in order to use and test it from Blender. To enable it, one has to switch the render feature set to experimental and activate the Procedural in the modifier. An Alembic Procedural is then created for each CacheFile from Blender set to use the Procedural, and each Blender object having a MeshSequenceCache modifier is added to list of objects of the right procedural. The procedural's parameters derive from the CacheFile's properties which are already exposed in the UI through the modifier, although more Cycles specific options might be added in the future. As there is currently no cache controls and since we load all the data at the beginning of the render session, the procedural is only available during viewport renders at the moment. When an Alembic procedural is rendered, data from the archive are not read on the Blender side. If a Cycles render is not active and the CacheFile is set to use the Cycles Procedural, bounding boxes are used to display the objects in the scene as a signal that the objects are not processed by Blender anymore. This is standard in other DCCs. However this does not reduce the memory usage from Blender as the Alembic data was already loaded either during an import or during a .blend file read. This is mostly a hack to test the Cycles Alembic procedural until we have a better Blender side mechanism for letting renderers load their own geometry, which will be based on import and export settings on Collections (T68933). Also included in this patch, although it will committed separately, is a setting to always add a cache reader (either a MeshSequenceCache modifier or a Transform Cache constraint) to the objects created from an Alembic archive. This setting is mostly useful to reload every object from the archive when it is updated without having to resort to re-importing the entire scene, but it is also used here to ensure that every object created from Alembic will be rendered through the Procedural. Ref T79174, D3089 Depends on D10196

This patch exposes the Cycles Alembic Procedural through the MeshSequenceCache modifier in order to use and test it from Blender. To enable it, one has to switch the render feature set to experimental and activate the Procedural in the modifier. An Alembic Procedural is then created for each CacheFile from Blender set to use the Procedural, and each Blender object having a MeshSequenceCache modifier is added to list of objects of the right procedural. The procedural's parameters derive from the CacheFile's properties which are already exposed in the UI through the modifier, although more Cycles specific options might be added in the future. As there is currently no cache controls and since we load all the data at the beginning of the render session, the procedural is only available during viewport renders at the moment. When an Alembic procedural is rendered, data from the archive are not read on the Blender side. If a Cycles render is not active and the CacheFile is set to use the Cycles Procedural, bounding boxes are used to display the objects in the scene as a signal that the objects are not processed by Blender anymore. This is standard in other DCCs. However this does not reduce the memory usage from Blender as the Alembic data was already loaded either during an import or during a .blend file read. This is mostly a hack to test the Cycles Alembic procedural until we have a better Blender side mechanism for letting renderers load their own geometry, which will be based on import and export settings on Collections (T68933). Also included in this patch, although it will committed separately, is a setting to always add a cache reader (either a MeshSequenceCache modifier or a Transform Cache constraint) to the objects created from an Alembic archive. This setting is mostly useful to reload every object from the archive when it is updated without having to resort to re-importing the entire scene, but it is also used here to ensure that every object created from Alembic will be rendered through the Procedural. Ref T79174, D3089 Depends on D10196