Cache geometry

[dgruwier]

It would be nice to be able to cache geometry between renders, so we don't have to redo subdivision and displacement every time we restart a render with just a shading or lighting tweak.
There's the "Cache geometry plugins between renders" option in render overrides, but I assume it works for third party plugins and not VRay subdivision/displacement since, well, it doesn't seem to work with VRay subdivision/displacement (?).

I figured this must be a fairly common wish, but I couldn't find any discussion about this on the forums.

[yolov]

It works for all plugins, not just 3rd party ones. We can keep all exported plugins in memory, so they are not exported the next time you render (unless the scene has changed). Subdivisions are done on geometry compile, though.

[dgruwier]

I'm probably misunderstanding what is meant by "plugins".

In any case, I'm specifically interested in keeping displacement + subdivisions from render to render. It's a pain to do small shader tweaks on an asset that takes seconds to actually render, but wait minutes for VRay to do subdivisions and displacement all over again.

[yolov]

Every piece of geometry is a plugin for V-Ray, not just objects created by 3rd party software. In this sense, everything geometry-wise is not re-translated and re-exported to V-Ray.
Unfortunately, subdivisions and displacement is something that happens to this plugins in a separate phase of the rendering, unrelated to the export, this is why it cannot be cached at the moment and it will be very tricky business to try and do so, according to the devs.

[dgruwier]

Okay, I think I understand. Well, it's on my wishlist anyway, along with the ability to export subdivided/displaced geometry as a vrmesh (for creating landscapes and such with displacement, then freezing it in place so it can be exported for FX and such)

[yolov]

I think this is somewhere on the list already, but I can't give you an idea when we'll get to it.

[dgruwier]

That's fine, I'm happy to hear it's on the list. Thanks Alex!