I am very impressed with the new update:
1. Multicore Preview....Wow!
2. Populate Object with other objects...Wow!
3. No crash from abborting renders...Cool!
4. Holes fixed in faster Spherical Camera...Great!
One of the things that was frustrating with the TG interface is that it could become very sluggish. Waiting on a single-threaded prerender was always there, regardless of the size of your load. With large populations, I have found that the interface won't even respond sometimes to trying to press the PAUSE prerender button. This I wanted to do so that I could start working on the nodes but the main thread was so busy in prerender that I couldn't do anything until it was finished. Now with the prerender being multi-threaded, I will not have to wait so long. This is a very welcome feature.
Two things I don't understand are (1) why the foreground in the prerender window fades out as it gets closer to the camera. This you can see in the default scene when you first run the program. and (2) I guess the white cross-hairs mark the axes of the origin or the position of the default camera?
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I think if the "main thread" were dedicated to the UI and didn't participate in any rendering, it would spend most of its time blocked waiting on user input. You could still have as many more threads as you have cores for rendering. If the rendering threads had low priority, then the UI would almost always be responsive and you could look around while (pre)rendering was going on without a frozen UI. The only times the UI would freeze is if the main thread were doing something like file I/O which can take some time for storing or loading large population caches, for instance.
