Blender.org

As 2.36 is about to come out, and I've already shot my mouth off about animation features, I thought I'd come here with a small request, too. To me, it seems that this would be a small step for a big payoff. Here goes...

It would be nice to have scripts be able to execute only at render time. You would have a new option in your script links dropdown: Redraw, FrameChange, and now, RenderTime.

The purpose of the new link would be to evaluated the linked script during the generation of renderfaces. Why would this be useful? Take the Fiber script, for example. You could do all of your settings, tests, comb splines without generating geometry. You could generate your geometry at half-density to see how it looked. Then, you'd link the emitting object to the the script with the Rendertime setting, and the hi-res geometry would be generated at rendertime.

It's mostly useful for scripts that generate lots of polys, but the savings in time and file size would be well worth it.

I agree- more flexability with scriptlinks will result in many benefits, and most likely even some that can't be seen at the moment. Also, how about a scriptlink that can be tied to specific objects and run when their selection property changes? I don't have an idea for a script that would use that, but I'm sure someone else does.

I agree too- And I can think of scripts that would use it-
Any script that made high res geometry, per frame-
Like a shader, this could be used to render fur, grass, procedural tree's etc.
On redraw executes way too often for this kinda pricky stuff.

It could also be used to do post processing (a few more functions might be needed) but - It could render passes etc. change modes, and alloiw the last frame to render as normal with changed modes- Then composite them or whatever.

It could also be used to execute render time LOD's, I dont know if anybody does this, but using distance based LODs could speed things up a bit (Level of detail)

This I think would be a good idea. However, I was thinking more of having scripts that only drew the results but not create any geometry when modelling + animating, and then actually creating some stuff at rendertime. That could be good for grass, as basically you only really want to see where the grass will roughly be, not have a large file that causes the computer to do a back-flip every time you load or edit it.