I think the “render proxy” is most important missing feature in cycles (ex. vrayproxy, coronaproxy, redshift proxies, arnold stand ins etc)…
… render proxy is like alembic, but the file is already in native memory format of the render for fast load and unload to harddisk if memory exceded… plus we can keep the lowpoly version for viewport fast interaction and hipoly version on render.
** if Blender Devs add a “load on render time only” option in blender “MESH SEQUENCE CACHE” modifier we would can use something like “render proxys” with alembic files (exporting blender’s obj to alembic file and loading back the alembic file in “mesh sequence cache” modifier) … now we can toggle viewport/render only button… but blender load alembic file before start cycles to render and keeping memory use after render finished:
**vrayproxy can load vrmesh vray native format and standard ALEMBIC format from disk on render time
- second missing thing is the ‘Distance Texture Node’ (ex. vraydistanceTex, corona distance texture)
I can do this using OSL script node (code from jordans), but cpu only and I think this is slow for heavy scenes:
