Please add support for a no-draw material. The application of a no-draw material would keep that face from being seen, rendered, or mapping created for it.
The benefits will be:
- Faster Cycles real-time view-port panning and movement for showing your work to clients.
- Faster rendering on projects with many parts.
- Faster rendering on projects with larger textures in their materials.
- Faster texture baking before rendering.
- Faster animations with Bongo.
- Likely lower GPU and CPU memory usage.
- With care, it could offer a bit relief for owners: of lower-powered systems, who have big aspirations.
- Stepping toward virtual-reality building walk-throughs, where rendering speed will be vitally important.
- (Speculative/future, but having a no-draw material applied to a face might terminate/extinguish a path-traced sample more efficiently other means.)
In usage, the no-draw material is applied to any face which needs not to be seen or presently edited by using a single-face selection, and applying it like a regular material: Shift-Click, and apply the material, making the face is as good as deleted, as far as rendering goes, but the object is intact.
If you were making a building: the no-draw material could be applied manually, to objects in Blocks, or applied with Grasshopper, using the material input on the Custom Preview to:
- The butted or mitered ends of door and window frames.
- The edges of glass sheets, so that there is never a coplaner rendering issue.
- The backs of: panels, trim, and ornamentation, and wall sconces.
- The bottoms of columns, furniture, tables, chairs, and cubicals, and throw rugs.
- The backs of backs of cabinets, and wall art.
For the material preview, a checkerboard appearance is traditional in Photoshop and game editors. On request, I could make one, as anyone else could.
In the following example, indeed, there several of the material textures are 2048âs, but thereâs not a lot of geometry here, compared to a skyscraper, or an airport, a gas-station, or stadium. I can make the file is available to McNeel, as long as it stays there.
Below, there are more than 1700 surfaces that donât need to be rendered. On a 4k screen on a 3900x/gtx1080, the response in real-time Cycles is about 5 frames a second for the overdraw, alone. In many mitered things, there are not one extra surface, but two.
Thank you for the consideration.