Geometry Nodes: support for geometry instancing

Previously, the Point Instance node in geometry nodes could only instance
existing objects or collections. The reason was that large parts of Blender
worked under the assumption that objects are the main unit of instancing.
Now we also want to instance geometry within an object, so a slightly larger
refactor was necessary.

This should not affect files that do not use the new kind of instances.

The main change is a redefinition of what "instanced data" is. Now, an
instances is a cow-object + object-data (the geometry). This can be nicely
seen in `struct DupliObject`. This allows the same object to generate
multiple geometries of different types which can be instanced individually.

A nice side effect of this refactor is that having multiple geometry components
is not a special case in the depsgraph object iterator anymore, because those
components are integrated with the `DupliObject` system.

Unfortunately, different systems that work with instances in Blender (e.g.
render engines and exporters) often work under the assumption that objects are
the main unit of instancing. So those have to be updated as well to be able to
handle the new instances. This patch updates Cycles, EEVEE and other viewport
engines. Exporters have not been updated yet. Some minimal (not master-ready)
changes to update the obj and alembic exporters can be found in P2336 and P2335.
Different file formats may want to handle these new instances in different ways.

For users, the only thing that changed is that the Point Instance node now
has a geometry mode.

This also fixes T88454.

Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D11841

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/source/blender/blenkernel/BKE_object.h b/source/blender/blenkernel/BKE_object.h
index a823602e341..31b3cd66cbb 100644
--- a/source/blender/blenkernel/BKE_object.h
+++ b/source/blender/blenkernel/BKE_object.h
@@ -458,6 +458,8 @@ void BKE_object_modifiers_lib_link_common(void *userData,
                                           struct ID **idpoin,
                                           int cb_flag);
 
+void BKE_object_replace_data_on_shallow_copy(struct Object *ob, struct ID *new_data);
+
 struct PartEff;
 struct PartEff *BKE_object_do_version_give_parteff_245(struct Object *ob);