Instances

From Sunflow Wiki

Contents 1 Instances 2 Transforms 3 Object Motion Blur

Instances

Instancing is when you use the geometry of another object in a scene without having to duplicate the object's mesh data. Instancing an object is useful in reducing the memory overhead, scene file size, and giving control over the objects since you change the main object and those mesh changes will be propagated to all the instances. Instances in Sunflow are great because you can change the location, rotation, scale, shader, and modifier of each instance. In Sunflow 0.07.2, you would use the following to instance the geometry:

instance {
   name nameOfInstance
   geometry theOriginalObjectName
   transform {
      rotatex -90
      scaleu 1.0
      translate -1.0 3.0 -1.0
   }
   shader shaderForInstance
   modifier modForInstance
}

Of course, the modifier line is optional.

Transforms

As with other objects you can use transforms just as described in the file-mesh transforms section. For transforming, you can use or not use a lot of the transform options: translate (as in translate x y z), rotatex, rotatey, rotatex, scalex, scaley, scalez, scaleu. You could also use a transform matrix by row (row) or column (col).

If you are using Blender, the exporter can take dupligrouped objects in the scene and export them out as instances. I go over this in the Blender exporter usage page here.

Object Motion Blur

As with generic meshes, in the 0.07.3 SVN version of Sunflow instances can be object blurred.