Lock mesh data to modifier
Often when you begin to have very large modifier setups, with many time consuming modifiers stacked, computing this stacking can take minutes at a time.
I propose a button to "Lock" the modified mesh data at any modifier, essentially temporarily "baking" all above modifiers into memory. All modifiers below the locked modifier will be live, and will compute with every change in modifier structure, like the current Blender behaviour. This will allow Blender to keep a fully procedural workflow, while being able to use very demanding modifiers.
This feature is already implemented in Houdini, a node-based procedural modeling software.
3 Comments
I'd assume this is one of the features that will be possible with the Everything Nodes update, not sure though.
Nice. I think it was already proposed somewhere. Maybe with everything nodes this will come out again. My vision for this is: two meshes are saved in the file, the original one and the baked one. Bigger file size, but a lot less calculations. </br> The only thing I would change is: not a lock button but a whole modifier for it: Bakemesh modifier, to be positioned in the desired level of the stack (then nodetree)
Would it be easier if there is not a special lock button, but when the same functionality is achieved by collapsing the modifier panel? Then, the entire stack down to the first un-collapsed panel would be pre-baked. This has the added advantage that the workspace also cleans up a bit. An obvious downside I recognize is that it become slow to review the settings of a modifier that was pre-baked...