Viewport baking for ultra fast viewport preview.
What this accomplishes: Full speed viewport preview on almost any hardware with almost unlimited scene complexity in any display mode.
An interface toggle that causes Blender to store an image of every viewport animation preview frame to a buffer. This "bakes" the viewport to memory on the timeline so scrubbing, pausing, and framestep would work. When the second preview playback begins Blender stops all the work of animating the rig/mesh at low fps and plays back the cached images as fast as it can load them overtop/into the viewport. Now you can see anything your working on from wireframe to material mode at full speed without rendering out!
If the viewport was moved it would break the image sequence playing and fall back to the start of the slow and fully rendered viewport animation with mouse control. When a full animation loop finished without view movement the data would be re-cached and the viewport animation preview would return to full speed as a sequence of images. Like cycles rendered mode but with animation.
I hope this makes sense. Whats wrong with this idea? Please let me know. Thanks.
1 Comment
How large should the buffer images be? Should they gobble up RAM or be stored on disk? If it's to RAM, then what should Blender do if the buffer is bigger than the available amount of RAM? If it's to disk, then where on disk would you suggest storing them and how would the user specify where