Attributes: Making Geometry Smaller and Faster

Blender
Blender
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Published 2023-10-26
The last major change of Blender's mesh system was the BMesh project over 10 years ago. Recently a project has been underway to change the mesh system significantly again, using principles from data-oriented design. Two years and more than 15 thousand lines of code later, that process is nearly finished. The idea is that data should be stored separately and generically, with the same simple data types that any Blender user or developer can use, as part of the attribute system.

Was it worth it? How much smaller can files be, and how much less memory do we use? Is Blender faster? How many bugs did the changes cause? This talk will answer those questions, and get into the history and some of the principles of the attribute system.

"Attributes: Making Geometry Smaller and Faster" by Hans Goudey --

Learn more about Blender Conference 2023 at conference.blender.org/2023/

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All Comments (21)
  • @YiChi457
    This dev is a gem. What he does are the simply the most important and fundamental changes that Blender needed for years. His work is amazing and most of Blender speed and efficiency is thanks to him. I hope the team trust him to refactor everything he plans to do because that will be only good on the long term.
  • @nickschultz1704
    Your work here has had a significant positive impact on my workflow. Thank you for saving me days and weeks of hours. I hope the Bfoundation keeps increasing the scope of your work! I am coming from 3ds Max and usually have to deal with CAD files. Sorry to compare, but I notice Blender does not handle the sheer number of objects as well, although I feel Blender handles millions of vertices in a scene better than Max, so long as they are in a small number of objects. I hope this will improve one day! Thank you!
  • @user-gz1jh1ir7q
    When Atlas stopped holding the sky, people like Hans began to do it. Amazing work! Thanks for presentation!
  • @DrTheRich
    I love data oriented design. Great to see my favorite software is now beginning to use that!
  • @henkkok9437
    Thank you for such thorough work and man that presentation was great, insightful to look that deep into the ‘behind whats behind the behind’. Learned a lot and gained a deeper appreciation for how things work.
  • @graf_fridula3981
    The work being done in this project was immensely important. Great Talk!
  • @vilemduha3856
    I remember I wrote a proposal for mesh attributes more than 10 years ago. It's clear what was needed was a capacity and time to bring this into blender. It's a huge game changer!
  • @boohoo5419
    lots of the speaker are very hyped up giving there talk. if have to say.. this was really refreshing. i liked his calm presentation style way more.
  • @steveboris8400
    Thank you for the work you have done. Where can we track the progress?
  • @TemaShahov
    You do a great job every day. It's so inspiring. Thank you!
  • @Windkind0
    Thanks a ton for the insight, and especially the tremendous work!
  • @newbiadk
    that sounds and look some great work thanks
  • @GauthierKERVYN
    Hi Hans, this change is brilliant; thank you. Just a remark about two little problems that may be linked to this topic (or not): -the 'measureIt' add-on uses the vertex's index and the labels change position when vertices are deleted. -the parented curves seem to use the parent curve's first node's position as reference instead of its origin.
  • @ronnetgrazer362
    Amazing work, great presentation, mad respect. As I understand it, the term "loop" describes a sequence of face corners where the edge of the last face corner connects to the vertex of the first, and "totloop" is short for total loop length. If so, that would still hold true when the concept doesn't need to be mentioned in the code anymore, right?
  • @fredericomartins3dartist255
    This is really exciting! not really a dev at all, but I love this kind of fundamental changes that end up enabling stuff that wasnt possible before. Amazing work!