106 833 296 polygons in Blender. Handling huge scenes

Great presentation Bob! 😊

Your suggestion could make Blender more interesting on really bigger project!

I was thinking how the devs could integrate this to replace the mesh in memory with a proxy object could be done in the GUI, and seeing two places where it would be intuitive to have them:

1 - The "OBJECT DATA" TAB
2 - As a modifier

The panel could have these options (image mockup):

This would replace the object IN MEMORY (Mesh overide?) and use the original model at render time. To make the modifier work, the blender devs would have to keep in memory the address of the original mesh that was loaded (or save it as a model in the same folder.), then replace the meshbuffer with the proxy specified model.

The only little problem I see with this is that the first instance of the model would be loaded completely until the modifier would apply. Once the modifier would apply memory footprint would be reduced at lot.

Perhaps if the devs could create a special flag to have this more integrated into the Blender loading system so once the scene is saved with the modifier applied on a model, it would use the modifier info at loading the scene. (like in the OBJECT DATA section)

At render time, it would need to load original model that was saved. It would also have to instance each mesh when duplicating.

If people like the idea, could propose it on the "Right Click Select". I can't give enough internal details as I don't know at all Blender inner working.