The goal is to give technical artists the ability to optimize modifier usage
and/or geometry node groups for performance. In the long term, it
would be useful if Blender could provide its own UI to display profiling
information to users. However, right now, there are too many open
design questions making it infeasible to tackle this in the short term.
This commit uses a simpler approach: Instead of adding new ui for
profiling data, it exposes the execution-time of modifiers in the Python
API. This allows technical artists to access the information and to build
their own UI to display the relevant information. In the long term this
will hopefully also help us to integrate a native ui for this in Blender
by observing how users use this information.
Note: The execution time of a modifier highly depends on what other
things the CPU is doing at the same time. For example, in many more
complex files, many objects and therefore modifiers are evaluated at
the same time by multiple threads which makes the measurement
much less reliable. For best results, make sure that only one object
is evaluated at a time (e.g. by changing it in isolation) and that no
other process on the system keeps the CPU busy.
As shown below, the execution time has to be accessed on the
evaluated object, not the original object.
```lang=python
import bpy
depsgraph = bpy.context.view_layer.depsgraph
ob = bpy.context.active_object
ob_eval = ob.evaluated_get(depsgraph)
modifier_eval = ob_eval.modifiers[0]
print(modifier_eval.execution_time, "s")
```
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D17185
Jacques Lucke
8adebaeb7c