Attributes: Making Geometry Smaller and Faster

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.ble...
#BCON23 #b3d

[@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.

[@Nixxun_Nic]

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!

[@borington4317]

Thank you guys for the amazing work you do!

[@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.

[@stefanspangenberg5557]

great talk hans! thank you for all the work.

[@DrTheRich]

I love data oriented design. Great to see my favorite software is now beginning to use that!

[@u1over]

Love this guy

[@graf_fridula3981]

The work being done in this project was immensely important. Great Talk!

[@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.

[@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!

[@Windkind0]

Thanks a ton for the insight, and especially the tremendous work!

[@TemaShahov]

You do a great job every day. It's so inspiring. Thank you!

[@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.

[@DirkTeucher]

This is outstanding, a huge achievement.

[@newbiadk]

that sounds and look some great work thanks

[@ant1fact]

I die inside every time that "totloop" variable gets uttered

[@Vidyut_Gore]

You should make a playlist.

[@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!

[@haraldthi]

Indeed. Type "why do I need to duplicate that huge mesh just because I want to use a subsurface modifier without it ending up into my equally huge scatter system?"

[@steveboris8400]

Thank you for the work you have done. Where can we track the progress?

[@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?

[@soyunbonus]

I hope we can modify/keep normals (baked normals particularly). Geometry Nodes is a great feature for VFX in games! EDIT: I like this guy!

I'm too dumb and old to even understand most of his talk, but he's one of the guys that makes Blender the best tool in the world!

[@jeffg4686]

@22:54 - I know it wasn't available at the time, but I wonder how good AI can do with these refactorings. It might still be a little ways out to get to that point, but likely not too far. Then that 2 year refactor will be like 2 weeks - taking care of things the AI didn't fix right.

[@genesis2303]

So in 29 minute comes the good stuff 😀

[@user-dx1no8ht2c]

did I understand it right, is blender 3.6x going to serve as a "conversion blender" between old blend files and 4.x+ blend files? as in I can open older blend files in blender 3.6, save it from there (either by overwriting the old file or as a new file by altering the name) and it will be usable in 4.x, and then I'm able to reopen it in 4.x and can re-save it in there to fully convert it to the 4.x standard?

[@cocamaster0]

No, you can open old files directly in 4.0. It's the other way around, you can't open 4.0 files on versions older than 3.6 unless you overwrite the new files with 3.6.

[@user-dx1no8ht2c]

so 3.6x serves as conversion tool for new files (blender 4.x) for use in older blender versions below 3.6x, and 4.x serves as conversion tool for older files to the new format?@@cocamaster0

[@shmuelisrl]

23:40 🤣😂😆

[@dyoanima]

nah es imposible, es muy dificil de entender