Blender Git Commit Log

Cycles: internal support for the concept of procedurals

Procedurals are nodes in the scene that can generate an arbitrary number of
other nodes at render time. This will be used to implement an Alembic procedural
that can load an Alembic file into Cycles nodes. In the future we also expect to
have a USD procedural.

Direct loading of such files at render time is a standard feature in other
production renderers. Reasons to support this are memory usage and performance,
delayed loading of heavy scene data until rendering, Cycles standalone rendering
using standard file formats beyond our XML files, and shared functionality for
Cycles integration in multiple 3D apps.

Ref T79174, D3089