Official Documentation:
http://www.blender.org/manual/render/workflows/multiview.html
Implemented Features
====================
Builtin Stereo Camera
* Convergence Mode
* Interocular Distance
* Convergence Distance
* Pivot Mode
Viewport
* Cameras
* Plane
* Volume
Compositor
* View Switch Node
* Image Node Multi-View OpenEXR support
Sequencer
* Image/Movie Strips 'Use Multiview'
UV/Image Editor
* Option to see Multi-View images in Stereo-3D or its individual images
* Save/Open Multi-View (OpenEXR, Stereo3D, individual views) images
I/O
* Save/Open Multi-View (OpenEXR, Stereo3D, individual views) images
Scene Render Views
* Ability to have an arbitrary number of views in the scene
Missing Bits
============
First rule of Multi-View bug report: If something is not working as it should *when Views is off* this is a severe bug, do mention this in the report.
Second rule is, if something works *when Views is off* but doesn't (or crashes) when *Views is on*, this is a important bug. Do mention this in the report.
Everything else is likely small todos, and may wait until we are sure none of the above is happening.
Apart from that there are those known issues:
* Compositor Image Node poorly working for Multi-View OpenEXR
(this was working prefectly before the 'Use Multi-View' functionality)
* Selecting camera from Multi-View when looking from camera is problematic
* Animation Playback (ctrl+F11) doesn't support stereo formats
* Wrong filepath when trying to play back animated scene
* Viewport Rendering doesn't support Multi-View
* Overscan Rendering
* Fullscreen display modes need to warn the user
* Object copy should be aware of views suffix
Acknowledgments
===============
* Francesco Siddi for the help with the original feature specs and design
* Brecht Van Lommel for the original review of the code and design early on
* Blender Foundation for the Development Fund to support the project wrap up
Final patch reviewers:
* Antony Riakiotakis (psy-fi)
* Campbell Barton (ideasman42)
* Julian Eisel (Severin)
* Sergey Sharybin (nazgul)
* Thomas Dinged (dingto)
Code contributors of the original branch in github:
* Alexey Akishin
* Gabriel Caraballo
This time, it's a dedicated operator user has to run before saving the file.
And it recursively check all IDs linked from each scene, therefore rendering
materials etc. previews using a scene they are used in.
Note the renderengine issue is not completely addressed this way
(existing code for icon previews seems to ignore completely other engines,
and IDs not linked anywhere (fake-user ones) will be rendered with current scene's engine
as fallback, also you can get a material linked to an hidden object in a scene, etc.).
Reviewers: sergey, campbellbarton
Reviewed By: campbellbarton
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D980
Make the UI API more consistent and reduce confusion with some naming.
mainly:
- API function calls
- enum values
some internal static functions have been left for now
it was caused by ee5f432. Not sure why exactly blender runs into
threading conflicts here since material preview works.
Let's keep it simple for now and disable material nodes preview,
because it's not supported by the interface anyway.
This is to be included to the final release.
Also refactor:
- Material property UI related to shadows
- Preparation of OR-ed mode flags (ma->mode_l) of render materials
Reviewers: brecht
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D313
The "Cast Shadows" worked as expected, but it can cause problem in some cases.
For example, when using strand render, we need disabling only buffer shadows,
but the previous changes made that impossible. "Cast Shadows" should be added
as a newly created option.
This allows us to make materials that don't cast ray shadows.
Turning off this property can reduce the rendering time slightly.
Note: RNA path is changed to "use_cast_shadows" as well. The older
path "use_cast_buffer_shadows" still can be used as its alias, but
it will be removed after updating some addons.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D272
Summary:
Mainly addressed to solve old TODO with color managed fallback
to CPU mode when displaying render result during rendering.
That fallback was caused by the fact that partial image update
was always acquiring image buffer for composite output and was
only modifying display buffer directly.
This was a big issue for Cycles rendering which renders layers
one by one and wanted to display progress of each individual
layer. This lead to situations when display buffer was based on
what Cycles passes via RenderResult and didn't take layer/pass
from image editor header into account.
Now made it so image buffer which partial update is operating
with always corresponds to what is set in image editor header.
To make Cycles displaying progress of all the layers one by one
made it so image_rect_update switches image editor user to
newly rendering render layer. It happens only once when render
engine starts rendering next render layer, so should not be
annoying for navigation during rendering.
Additional change to render engines was done to make it so
they're able to merge composite output to final result
without marking tile as done. This is done via do_merge_result
argument to end_result() callback. This argument is optional
so should not break script compatibility.
Additional changes:
- Partial display update for Blender Internal now happens from
the same thread as tile rendering. This makes it so display
conversion (which could be pretty heavy actually) is done in
separate threads. Also gives better UI feedback when rendering
easy scene with small tiles.
- Avoid freeing/allocating byte buffer for render result
if it's owned by the image buffer. Only mark it as invalid
for color management.
Saves loads of buffer re-allocations in cases when having
several image editors opened with render result. This change
in conjunction with the rest of the patch gave around
50%-100% speedup of render time when displaying non-combined
pass during rendering on my laptop.
- Partial display buffer update was wrong for buffers with number
of channels different from 4.
- Remove unused window from RenderJob.
- Made image_buffer_rect_update static since it's only used
in single file.
Reviewers: brecht
Reviewed By: brecht
CC: dingto
Differential Revision: http://developer.blender.org/D98
- memset() was argument was truncated.
- outliner had redundant NULL check.
- node texture was allocating memory to make a unique name which isnt needed for a fixed size string.
draw mode. This happens because it uses node data structures in threads, now
it does same as preview render, which is to immediately stop the render thread
when e.g. deleting nodes.
* Particles did not render at viewport resolution like meshes.
* Properties editor preview render of hair was crashing, solution is to have
two separate flags for this preview render and viewport preview render.
- Put it available as a default now (no debug value needed)
- Fixed viewport size error, viewport was badly set
(visible with border render, property regions)
- Fixed hanging lock in conflict between drawing and initialize
new renders.
viewport render changes.
Actually was an older issue that would cause unnecessary preview render restarts
if the render result was not allocated before it was drawn. Now the render result
is being reallocated each time for freestyle which made the issue worse.
Because of our release soon, feature has been added behind the Debug Menu.
CTRL+ALT+D and set it to -1. Or commandline --debug-value -1.
When debug set to -1, you can put the viewport to 'render' mode, just like
for Cycles. Notes for testers: (and please no bugs in tracker for this :)
- It renders without AA, MBlur, Panorama, Sequence, Composite
- Only active render layer gets rendered. Select another layer will re-render.
- But yes: it works for FreeStyle renders!
- Also does great for local view.
- BI is not well suited for incremental renders on view changes. This only
works for non-raytrace scenes, or zoom in ortho or camera mode, or for
Material changes. In most cases a full re-render is being done.
- ESC works to stop the preview render.
- Borders render as well. (CTRL+B)
- Force a refresh with arrow key left/right. A lot of settings don't trigger
re-render yet.
Tech notes:
- FreeStyle is adding a lot of temp objects/meshes in the Main database. This
caused DepsGraph to trigger changes (and redraws). I've prepended the names
for these temp objects with char number 27 (ESC), and made these names be
ignored for tag update checking.
- Fixed some bugs that were noticable with such excessive re-renders, like
for opening file window, quit during renders.
PyNodes opens up the node system in Blender to scripters and adds a number of UI-level improvements.
=== Dynamic node type registration ===
Node types can now be added at runtime, using the RNA registration mechanism from python. This enables addons such as render engines to create a complete user interface with nodes.
Examples of how such nodes can be defined can be found in my personal wiki docs atm [1] and as a script template in release/scripts/templates_py/custom_nodes.py [2].
=== Node group improvements ===
Each node editor now has a tree history of edited node groups, which allows opening and editing nested node groups. The node editor also supports pinning now, so that different spaces can be used to edit different node groups simultaneously. For more ramblings and rationale see (really old) blog post on code.blender.org [3].
The interface of node groups has been overhauled. Sockets of a node group are no longer displayed in columns on either side, but instead special input/output nodes are used to mirror group sockets inside a node tree. This solves the problem of long node lines in groups and allows more adaptable node layout. Internal sockets can be exposed from a group by either connecting to the extension sockets in input/output nodes (shown as empty circle) or by adding sockets from the node property bar in the "Interface" panel. Further details such as the socket name can also be changed there.
[1] http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Phonybone/Python_Nodes
[2] http://projects.blender.org/scm/viewvc.php/trunk/blender/release/scripts/templates_py/custom_nodes.py?view=markup&root=bf-blender
[3] http://code.blender.org/index.php/2012/01/improving-node-group-interface-editing/
from Lawrence D'Oliveiro (ldo)
More use of bool type, necessitating adding inclusion of BLI_utildefines.h, or moving it up in the inclusion order if it was already included, in various places
- storage.c: make some variables only used in bli_builddir local to that
- storage.c: BLI_file_descriptor_size should allow 0 as a valid file descriptor
- path_util.c: make pointers to non-reentrant storage returned from folder routines const, necessitating making variables holding these returned pointers const elsewhere as well
- path_util.c: BLI_string_to_utf8 closes iconv context in case of conversion error
- blf_lang.c: fill_locales routine now has its own "languages" local variable to construct paths (was stealing internal storage belonging to BLI_get_folder before)
