Scene Expense heatmap
Like false colour a way to visualise what the cost of an asset is in a scene maybe showing high poly objects in red and low in blue.. the idea is to balance out the scene or to establish what asset maybe slowing down your scene. probab a daft Idea sorry thinking it may help with render times etc.
2 Comments
This would be a useful thing sometimes, and interesting as a data visualization. You are asking for an occasional by-object profiler. I can see collecting time-stamps before/after each processing step, but aside from red took longer than blue, I don't see how you would really get a useful Quantitative metric from this -- after normalization, all it is going to say is that this Particle-System or Fluid-Sim is taking all your time.
You can learn the same thing by selectively toggling the many visibility's in { ViewPort, Render, ... } on { Objects, Modifiers, ParticleSystems, Cloth, Physics, etc } to find the one that makes your render-time increase by a huge amount. There is also "[x] Statistics" in the Overlays dropdown of the Viewport header (top-right). This will tell you which selected object has 10^6 vertices (hi-poly).
It would be a cool way to look at a scene though. Have you considered writing a quick addon to compute vertex-counts (or other stuff), and put the answer in a custom property for each object. Then you could make a quick shader to read this number through a ColorRamp.
sadly my skillset is purely on the creative side, may be a good opportunity for me t delve more into the python side of things.