Render: faster animation and re-rendering with Persistent Data

For Cycles, when enabling the Persistent Data option, the full render data
will be preserved from frame-to-frame in animation renders and between
re-renders of the scene. This means that any modifier evaluation, BVH
building, OpenGL vertex buffer uploads, etc, can be done only once for
unchanged objects. This comes at an increased memory cost.

Previously there option was named Persistent Images and had a more limited
impact on render time and memory.

When using multiple view layers, only data from a single view layer is
preserved to keep memory usage somewhat under control. However objects
shared between view layers are preserved, and so this can speedup such
renders as well, even single frame renders.

For Eevee and Workbench this option is not available, however these engines
will now always reuse the depsgraph for animation and multiple view layers.
This can significantly speed up rendering.

These engines do not support sharing the depsgraph between re-renders, due
to technical issues regarding OpenGL contexts. Support for this could be added
if those are solved, see the code comments for details.

2 files changed, 10 insertions, 8 deletions

diff --git a/source/blender/makesrna/intern/rna_render.c b/source/blender/makesrna/intern/rna_render.c
index 0411ef6d6ee..dd91a5509f5 100644
--- a/source/blender/makesrna/intern/rna_render.c
+++ b/source/blender/makesrna/intern/rna_render.c
@@ -298,13 +298,13 @@ static void rna_RenderEngine_unregister(Main *bmain, StructRNA *type)
     return;
   }
 
+  /* Stop all renders in case we were using this one. */
+  ED_render_engine_changed(bmain, false);
   RE_FreeAllPersistentData();
+
   RNA_struct_free_extension(type, &et->rna_ext);
   RNA_struct_free(&BLENDER_RNA, type);
   BLI_freelinkN(&R_engines, et);
-
-  /* Stop all renders in case we were using this one. */
-  ED_render_engine_changed(bmain, false);
 }
 
 static StructRNA *rna_RenderEngine_register(Main *bmain,
diff --git a/source/blender/makesrna/intern/rna_scene.c b/source/blender/makesrna/intern/rna_scene.c
index 65643aa92d7..cc7747959a4 100644
--- a/source/blender/makesrna/intern/rna_scene.c
+++ b/source/blender/makesrna/intern/rna_scene.c
@@ -1896,10 +1896,10 @@ static void rna_Scene_use_persistent_data_update(Main *UNUSED(bmain),
                                                  Scene *UNUSED(scene),
                                                  PointerRNA *ptr)
 {
-  Scene *sce = (Scene *)ptr->owner_id;
+  Scene *scene = (Scene *)ptr->owner_id;
 
-  if (!(sce->r.mode & R_PERSISTENT_DATA)) {
-    RE_FreePersistentData();
+  if (!(scene->r.mode & R_PERSISTENT_DATA)) {
+    RE_FreePersistentData(scene);
   }
 }
 
@@ -6606,8 +6606,10 @@ static void rna_def_scene_render_data(BlenderRNA *brna)
   /* persistent data */
   prop = RNA_def_property(srna, "use_persistent_data", PROP_BOOLEAN, PROP_NONE);
   RNA_def_property_boolean_sdna(prop, NULL, "mode", R_PERSISTENT_DATA);
-  RNA_def_property_ui_text(
-      prop, "Persistent Data", "Keep render data around for faster re-renders");
+  RNA_def_property_ui_text(prop,
+                           "Persistent Data",
+                           "Keep render data around for faster re-renders and animation renders, "
+                           "at the cost of increased memory usage");
   RNA_def_property_update(prop, 0, "rna_Scene_use_persistent_data_update");
 
   /* Freestyle line thickness options */