I love all the best practice tips I pick up from this forum on how to keep the models light and snappy for working with LO. Thank you everyone for figuring out and sharing your knowledge. I try to do the same.
With that said, as in any software, there is always room for improvement. I’m not a software programmer or developer, so I don’t know the technical difficulties involved, but as a user having worked with other software packages, it seems that they tend to take better advantage of today’s modern hardware and can easily handle very large models with very little lag.
Creative workarounds are great to know, but it’s much better when the software/hardware enable you to not have to think about workarounds, letting you focus on your designs.
One specific example in the past I ran into back between the mid 1990s to 2010ish was with rendering/animation software and the use of radiosity lighting effects. The visuals looked so amazing with radiosity on versus off, with the color of objects bouncing off each other giving a next level of realism, but the time to render cost was extremely heavy in that era of limited compute power. So I developed a techique that I even taught in university classes to not use radiosity but to instead, place a colorized omni light inside strongly colored objects (like a bright red sofa) with limited illumination range and exclude the object that it was inside of from casting shadows. The techniques worked great and resulted in at least ten times faster renderings that was absolutely critical when producing long animations for projects with deadlines.
This was awesome for the years of limited compute power, but as the years went on, hardware and software improved and in the end my technique was not needed anymore, and it was great! Today I use Enscape to do real-time renderings of my projects with zero delay and it incorporates it’s own real-time radiosity technique giving me and my clients fairly realistic results with zero rendering time for screen captures and VR, and extremely fast rendering times for animations and high-res image outputs.
In the end, I think the goal of any creator software should be to work at the speed of thought with as few limitations as possible taking advantage of the latest state of the art technologies available.
SU and Enscape has for the most part achieved that goal for me, and as mentioned in another post, if LO could somehow utilize the insane power available with the latest CPUs and GPUs, and allow designers to push the limits on how much detail they want to use or not and to make real-time vector, hybrid or raster outputs while improving stability, it would place SU and LO as a top option for many people in many different industries.