Have option to delay cycles render mode refresh until after changes have been made
I suggest to add an option perhaps in the render view settings, just a check box, that when ticked on will delay the render view from updating while changes are being made in blender. In most scenes I am totally fine but while in complex scenes, even when isolating on a single object, and ESPECIALLY when changing a color, (I don't know what it is about changing a color but that seems to be the most taxing thing you can do in the editor), all of blender will sometimes stall and things like changing color is laggy. I am not running the most up to date computer but my computer was top of the top of the line 3 years ago and still out performs most $2000 computers today so I doubt my hardware is specifically the problem. This seems to be isolated to complex scenes, use of volumes, and frequent use of complex node trees with 20+ nodes.
The concept is simple. The checkbox is easily accessible from your render tab> render view panel. If you are in a situation where everything works smooth and fine, you leave the checkbox off and cycles will continue as it does now to try to update in real time as you make changes, however, when checked on, the render preview will wait for you to stop making changes in other editor windows before updating. This wait period should not affect changes made specifically in the render preview window as you may need to see panning or orbiting in live time, but should take effect when making changes in other windows like the node editor, render tab, world tab, etc which might cause the render view to update and slow down other more important processes like picking a color connecting/disconnecting nodes quickly.
2 Comments
There is a preview pause button but it is more smart that cycles wait for the user to complete the changes as you proposed. +1
* @yasharjk * Thank you for the +1, yeah I tinkered with the pause button but it is a workflow nightmare. I have played around with starting pixel optimizations and it helps a bit but like you pointed out, there is a pause button, but I shouldn't have to click that every time I move a slider. Actions like sliding a factor on a mix node or draging on a color wheel seem to be the most taxing to update both the color wheel or the location of the slider and cycles at the same time. It makes more sense just to have an option for cycles to wait until it hasn't received any new inputs for 500ms or 1 second or something.