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Blocking Meshes
The idea behind blocking meshes is simple, direct, and physically based. It is applicable for static portions of the set, rather than actors.
If you have modeled a wall and a desk in front of it, then the mesh for the desk will block the portions of the wall behind it, preventing those sections from participating in the wall's texture extraction. If the camera moves sufficiently that the portion behind the desk is exposed elsewhere in the shot, then the wall's entire texture can be computed. If not, the wall texture will have a blank spot—one that can not be seen as it is behind the desk!
A complex scene may have many meshes in it, some used for texture extraction, some used for blocking, some not. To allow performance to be optimized, the texture control panel contains a control over whether or not a particular mesh should be tested to see if it blocks any texture extractions.
It may be set to Blocking or Non-blocking and defaults to non-blocking; usually only a few must be set to blocking, if any. The blocking control can and should be adjusted as needed for meshes whether or not they are having their textures extracted or not. There is a notable calculation overhead for blocking meshes, as something similar to a render must be performed on each frame for each blocking render.
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