Hi Martin,

> Instances to me are just a memory/speed saving measure which is of course
> highly desired within a 32bit environment.

They're definitely used for that a lot, but other people also use them for pretty separate things from that - either to be able to do modifications and have all shared instances get updated, and also to have the components list be a "bill of materials" that just keeps track of how many of each part are in there.

So most likely the components UI will have some stuff oriented around these other uses of instancing as well.


> I don't like throwing spanners into the mixing bowl, but since MOI has no ray trace
> rendering engine, and most models are therefore exported to the likes of MAX, C4D,
> Blender et al then you could in reality leave instancing to those applications as most
> already do it. It would be harsh but understandable, and I would really like to see
> instances in MOI.

Even when MoI does have instances (I definitely expect to have them at some point), you still may want to do the instancing in your rendering programs instead in many cases since many of the somewhat older mesh file formats do not have any instancing mechanism in the file format structure itself. For example OBJ format does not have any kind of instancing in it. Instances will have to get converted into regular copies when doing a transfer through one of those kinds of file formats.

- Michael