Geometry Sets¶
Note
These docs are based on code comments in BKE_geometry_set.hh. When making changes, please keep that up to date too.
A geometry set is a container for multiple kinds of geometry. It does not own geometry directly itself, instead geometry is owned by multiple Geometry Components, and the geometry set increases the user count of each component, so they avoid losing the data. This means individual components might be shared between multiple geometries and other code. Shared components are copied automatically when write access is requested.
The components usually do not store data by themself, but keep a reference to a data structure defined elsewhere in Blender. There is at most one component of each type:
MeshComponentCurveComponentPointCloudComponentInstancesComponentVolumeComponent
Copying a geometry set is a relatively cheap operation, because it does
not copy the referenced geometry components, so GeometrySet can
often be passed or moved by value.
Geometry Components¶
Mesh Component¶
A geometry component that can store a mesh, using the Mesh
data-block.
Attributes are stored, on any of the four attribute domains. Generic attributes are stored in contiguous arrays, but often built-in attributes are stored in an array of structs fashion for historical reasons, requiring more complex attribute access.
Point Cloud Component¶
A geometry component that stores a point cloud, corresponding to the
PointCloud data structure. While a point cloud is technically a
subset of a mesh in some respects, it is useful because of its
simplicity, partly on a conceptual level for the user, but also in the
code, though partly for historical reasons. Point clouds can also be
rendered in special ways, based on the built-in radius attribute.
Attributes on point clouds are all stored in contiguous arrays in its
CustomData, which makes them efficient to process, relative to some
legacy built-in mesh attributes.
Curve Component¶
A geometry component that stores a group of curves, corresponding the
Curves data-block type and the CurvesGeometry data structure.
Attributes are are stored on the control point domain and the curve
domain.
Instances Component¶
A geometry component that stores instances. The instance data can be any
type described by InstanceReference. Geometry instances can even
contain instances themselves, for nested instancing. Each instance has
an index into an array of unique instance data, and a transform. The
component can also store generic attributes for each instance.
The component works differently from other geometry components in that it stores data about instancing directly, rather than owning a pointer to a separate data structure.
This component is not responsible for handling the interface to a render
engine, or other areas that work with all visible geometry, that is
handled by the dependency graph iterator (see
DEG_depsgraph_query.h).
Instance Reference¶
An instance reference holds a reference to conceptually unique geometry
or a pointer to object/collection data that is is instanced with a
transform in InstancesComponent.
Volume Component¶
A geometry component that stores volume grids, corresponding to the #Volume data structure. This component does not implement an attribute API, partly because storage of sparse volume information in grids is much more complicated than it is for other types