>> I often see folks with issues where only a few components of a scene actually
>> change, while other parts are what are "actively" being rendered.  Would it be
>> possible to define "layers" - some of which would render and others wouldn't?
>
> Even a small change can have an effect on other parts of the scene due to
> shadows, reflections, refractions and radiosity.

And usually if you're sure it won't have any impact (or are not bothered 
about the errors) you can write some SDL to render the parts separately 
anyway (using #if, texture baking, transparency etc). This is sometimes 
done for the background/environment, rendered once with a spherical 
camera, and then just included as an HDR textured sphere in future renders.

The only thing that could be improved is not having to reparse the whole 
scene each animation frame, but that's not likely to change until the 
whole SDL/parser is rewritten. An idea I had was that you could load and 
save a "binary" version of an object much like you can do with radiosity 
data. That way if you have a huge mesh in an animation (that is not 
changing) it wouldn't take forever to parse exactly the same data each 
frame.

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