[virtualritz]

What is the point of importing a dataset of this complexity if you can't also work with the data inside the DCC?

Try the thousands of tools and plugins available for Blender with such data and see what happens. Good luck.

I guess my point is: you need to also "fix" any of those that crash/hang/are too slow to make this worthwhile.

Just to be clear again: awesome they fixed the bugs that lead to crashes with this data. Not sure if that large a dataset was required at all to do that though.

But the speed improvements? Do they matter for your average OBJ? And if no one ever imports data of the complexity of the Moana dataset, because they can't work with it afterwards anyway, any speed improvement that is not felt in the average use case is a nice engineering exercise, foremost.

There is a reason why most commercial DCCs, too, struggle with data sets of this size and no one has ever "fixed" this. ;)

[rmetzler]

> What is the point of importing a dataset of this complexity if you can't also work with the data inside the DCC?

My understanding is, that you need to reproduce the rendering bug which crashes blender to be able to fix it. And being able to reproduce it, needs to be fast. Even if you have a smaller scene which would trigger this bug, without the optimisations it would take a lot of important time in the feedback loop. Now you have a workflow which crashes the rendering in less than 2 minutes.

[virtualritz]

See this reply from someone else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32190577

[rmetzler]

I really don't understand your point at all. You might be right, the use case doesn't exist yet, maybe never. But this never was the point of the blog post.

Making the application wait extremely long or even crash by importing _something_ is a bug in my understanding. Why shouldn't it be fixed? Why shouldn't developers improve performance and blog about it, so other devs learn from it?

It's not about the Moana scene, that's just the test case, so OP has a valid benchmark with human comprehensible durations. The scene could be anything that is smaller and it will be imported faster now.

[andai]

See the reply to that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191173

>At some point, the little pieces need to be assembled, reviewed and finally rendered. Why wouldn't you do that with the DCC application rather than with specialized, limited tools?

[virtualritz]

See the explanations in my other replies on this topic.

It is impossible to hold a typical VFX scene in RAM to start with.

Even freelancers doing sim/FX work now have at least 128GB RAM and this is often just enough for proxy work that still gets expanded at render time.

I.e. consider the possibility that your worst estimate of how complex this data could be is off by 1-3 orders of magnitude.

And for your example: the person who signs this off is the VFX supervisor. They don't sign off anything but final frames.

[colechristensen]

It’s a stress test. It doesn’t have to be reasonable. This is what you do for performance improvement, you push as hard as you can to find the worst actors and fix them.

Performance improvements like this expand the horizons of what is reasonable to do.

There’s a circular logic problem where you argue that performance problems shouldn’t be fixed because nobody actually does this, but nobody does it because of performance problems. No, this effort didn’t solve every performance problem required to do a thing, but did it solve some of it.

“We didn’t do everything so we should have done nothing” is not how you build a performant product.

[cinntaile]

He sped up parts of the blender pipeline, someone will no doubt benefit.

He does address that the crashing also needs to be fixed but that he doesn't want to be the guy doing that.