Wish: Option to not save position. If an ID is provided (or implied by order), a lookup to a table of positions could be used to set the positions of particles.
EDIT: Offbeat use case, you could use KCM to copy ID to mapping channel and sample a huge bitmap to get position channel in another KCM. Better use case? You have a plugin or standalone PRT editor that does the lookup function, and not saving the position saves a lot of I/O.
I’ll try it out to get a feel for how badly this will affect Krakatoa. Currently we always assume there is a float32 channel for Position, and its pretty pervasive.
Obviously for rendering a position channel would be required. The PRT Loader could set a “default” position for all the particles to be at the origin/pivot of the PRT Loader, and we could just change it with a KCM or other modifiers or whatnot.
So KCM’s and the renderer would never see a case where the particles had no position, right? PRT Loader would need to know to set the position when none is defined, and the renderer would be told that if the position is unchecked when saving to skip it. So it would change the PRT writing code.
Not sure how the PFlow operator would work… I assume it would be like the PRT Loader, setting a default position vector for all the particles if one does not exist.
You speak the truth. We could probably get away with not saving Position to disk, but I pity the poor user that does that by accident.
It wouldn’t be the default, of course…