Technically interesting question of the day: What is the recommended way to get a reference to an arbitrary scene object from primitive data such as a string or LONG?
I am trying to improve performance on an exporter I inherited from somebody that no longer works here. We are experiencing major slowdowns in the area of exporting render passes for our environments as some scenes take 20+ minutes. Our environment scenes contain thousands of objects which are mostly contained inside of referenced models and can have parameters overridden using override properties applied to partitions. We currently only support overrides for our custom shader parameters and object viewvis/rendvis parameters. In an effort to keep our exported files small, we only export a parameter override if its value is different from the default_pass. If the parameter is exported, its original name is used (Parameter.GetFullName() as seen in default pass, not as seen in the current pass). This is to keep mapping 1:1 and efficient in our runtime engine. The area of biggest slowdown is reverse engineering the parameter name in the override to determine the parameter it's overriding in the default pass. While the Softimage SDK provides the ability to do this (Parameter.GetOverridenObject() ), it's incredibly slow. The original code calls FindChildren() and iterates through all objects in the scene to build a map to cache object visibility and material assignments in the default pass. The object's fullname is used as the key to store/retrieve information from the map. In an effort to reduce data storage requirements, and reduce amount of string parsing in downstream helper functions, I converted the map to use Object IDs as the look up key. While it greatly simplified the exporter code, to my surprise it made performance noticeably worse. Caching the settings using Object.GetObjectID() was very fast, but when it came to retrieving the information downstream in a helper function, I had to use CRef.Set( <objectID> ) to convert the Object ID back into an object reference. That conversion was really, really, slow in comparison. In scripting I would use Dictionary.GetObject() which equates to CRef.Set() in the C++ API. But in either case that is not very efficient when dealing with thousands of objects in multiple passes. In scripting I could use XSICollection.items = <value> to more quickly create the references and forego errors being thrown, but I don't see an equivalent in the C++ API. So the question is - what is the fastest way to get a reference to an object in the scene from an ID or string using the C++ API? Matt
