- Particle system distribution wasn't flushed properly for non-edited hair.
- For instances in the renderer, also count their verts and faces in the stats.
- Fix for error in the "surface diffuse" formula for strand shading.
This is actually just the alpha value as currently being calculated
by the mist code. It is in many cases not very useful to have this as
alpha in shading result, also for postprocess and composite.
Note: this pass also works with "Mist" not set in World, of course.
=============================
A new approximate ambient occlusion method has been added, next to the
existing one based on raytracing. This method is specifically targetted
at use in animations, since it is inherently noise free, and so will
not flicker across frames.
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/approximate-ambient-occlusion/http://peach.blender.org/index.php/approximate-ambient-occlusion/
Further improvements are still needed, but it can be tested already. There
are still a number of known issues:
- Bias errors on backfaces.
- For performance, instanced object do not occlude currently.
- Sky textures don't work well, the derivatives for texture evaluation
are not correct.
- Multiple passes do not work entirely correct (they are not accurate
to begin with, but could be better).
It seems everytime I try to fix something here I break something
else, but anyway, another try at getting this to work properly.
Fixes for:
- Getting dupliverts/faces derivedmesh with orco caused wrong results
on meshes in linked dupligroups with proxy, because modifier stack
was revaluated with wrong object matrix, now gets orco another way.
- Fix render instances being hidden when original object was not added
to the object render list.
- Changed the way object instances find their original objects, now
works the other way around, original objects look for their instances
instead.
There's probably issues still with recursive dupligroups..
[#6861] Black dots when using small lamps on Mirror materials in 2.44 and 2.43.
some values were not initialized properly, for example, the window coordinates for reflections, this caused NAN color values for some pixels, (may also fix plumiferos bad pixel problem from last bconf)
====================
- "From Dupli" option for orco and uv texture coordinates. For dupliverts,
duplifaces and dupli particles, this uses the orco and uv at the point
on the parent surface. Can for example be used for texturing feathers
and leafs. Note that uv only works for duplifaces and particles emitted
from faces, these are not defined at vertices.
- "Width Fade" option for strand render, to fade out along the width of the
strand. Committing this so it can be tested, might be changed or removed
even, if it doesn't give nice results.
============================
- Strand render now has options to remove child strands as
the object's faces becomes smaller, in the Simplification
particle panel.
- "Reference Size" is the approximate size of the object on
screen, after which simplification starts.
- "Rate" is how fast strands are removed.
- "Transition" is the percentage of strands being faded out as
they are removed.
- Another "Viewport" option removes strands on faces that are
outside of the viewport. "Rate" again controls how fast these
are removed.
- Strand render in Blender Units now has an adjustable minimum
width. Below this minimum width, strands start fading out
instead of getting smaller.
=========
- The render and realtime button for the particle system modifier
and the enabled button for particles now work seperate again,
made a bad design decision to tie them together. Now with only
the render button and not realtime enabled it renders.
- Fix for bug #7948: particle mode crash while constraining axis.
- Fix for bug #7945: crash loading effector groups from an old file.
- Fix for bug #7942: crash for reactor particles emitting from particles.
===============================
- One shadowbuffer per thread.
- Added more break tests in shadow buffer code.
- Removed R.clipcrop global, solution is not nice yet, but at
least threadsafe.
- Fixed bug in strand render shadow buffer code.
=================
Big commit, but little user visible changes.
- Dupliverts and duplifaces are now rendered as instances, instead
of storing all of the geometry for each dupli, now an instance is
created with a matrix transform refering to the source object.
This should allow us to render tree leaves more memory efficient.
- Radiosity and to some degree raytracing of such objects is not
really efficient still. For radiosity this is fundamentally hard
to solve, but raytracing an octree could be created for each object,
but the current octree code with it's fixed size doesn't allow this
efficiently.
- The regression tests survived, but with I expect that some bugs will
pop up .. hopefully not too many :).
Implementation Notes
====================
- Dupligroups and linked meshes are not rendered as instances yet,
since they can in fact be different due to various reasons,
instancing of these types of duplis that are the same can be added
for them at a later point.
- Each ObjectRen now stores it's own database, instead of there being
one big databases of faces, verts, .. . Which objects that are actually
rendered are defined by the list of ObjectRenInstances, which all refer
to an ObjectRen.
- Homogeneous coordinatess and clipping is now not stored in vertices
anymore, but instead computed on the fly. This couldn't work for
instances. That does mean some extra computation has to be done, but
memory lookups can be slow too, and this saves some memory. Overall
I didn't find a significant speed impact.
- OSA rendering for solid and ztransp now is different. Instead of e.g.
going 8 times over the databases times and rendering the z-buffer, it
now goes over the database once and renders each polygon 8 times. That
was necessary to keep instances efficient, and can also give some
performance improvement without instances.
- There was already instancing support in the yafray export code, now it
uses Blender's render instances for export.
- UV and color layer storage in the render was a bit messy before, now
should be easier to understand.
- convertblender.c was reorganized somewhat. Regular render, speedvector
and baking now use a single function to create the database, previously
there was code duplicated for it.
- Some of these changes were done with future multithreading of scene
and shadow buffer creation in mind, though especially for scene creation
much work remains to be done to make it threadsafe, since it also involves
a lot of code from blenkernel, and there is an ugly conflict with the way
dupli groups work here .. though in the render code itself it's almost there.
=========
- Normalize strand coordinates over the length of the strand, not
cut off when with e.g. length texture control.
- Weight paint and particle mode x-mirror now works with deformation
and shape keys active.
- X-ray is now disabled in particle mode, messed up depth tests.
=========
- Texture orco coordinates for particles are now actual orcos instead
of just the vertex positions, which means they are the same under
deformations and the same as the ones on the mesh.
- Particle distribution now uses these orcos to get consistent
distributions independent of deformation.
- This required changing the way orco's are computed for meshes. Now
instead of generating an orco derivedmesh separately, the derivedmesh
is generated alongside the regular one and stored in an orco custom
data layer.
=========
- Fix crash in particle transform with the particle system not editable.
- Particle child distribution and caching is now multithreaded.
- Child particles now have a separate Render Amount next to the existing
Amount. The render amount particles are now only distributed and cached
at render time, which should make editing with child particles faster.
- Two new options for diffuse strand shading:
- Surface Diffuse: computes the strand normal taking the normal at
the surface into account.
- Blending Distance: the distance in Blender units over which to
blend in the normal at the surface.
- Special strand rendering for more memory efficient and faster hair and
grass. This is a work in progress, and has a number of known issues,
don't report bugs to me for this feature yet.
More info:
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/particles/
=============
A new "Selected to Active" option in the Bake panel, to (typically) bake
a high poly object onto a low poly object. Code based on patch #7339 by
Frank Richter (Crystal Space developer), thanks!.
Normal Mapping
==============
Camera, World, Object and Tangent space is now supported for baking, and
for material textures. The "NMap TS" setting is replaced with a dropdown
of the four choices in the image texture buttons.
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/render-baking/
=========
- Fix for bug #7832: boids physics crashed.
- Bugfix for child particles not getting orco texture coords.
- Allow smaller strand sizes in blender units.
- Fix for a common but harmless uninitialized value warning in
valgrind, in the event queue.
=========
Merge of the famous particle patch by Janne Karhu, a full rewrite
of the Blender particle system. This includes:
- Emitter, Hair and Reactor particle types.
- Newtonian, Keyed and Boids physics.
- Various particle visualisation and rendering types.
- Vertex group and texture control for various properties.
- Interpolated child particles from parents.
- Hair editing with combing, growing, cutting, .. .
- Explode modifier.
- Harmonic, Magnetic fields, and multiple falloff types.
.. and lots of other things, some more info is here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/Particles_Rewritehttp://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/Particles_Rewrite_Doc
The new particle system cannot be backwards compatible. Old particle
systems are being converted to the new system, but will require
tweaking to get them looking the same as before.
Point Cache
===========
The new system to replace manual baking, based on automatic caching
on disk. This is currently used by softbodies and the particle system.
See the Cache API section on:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/PhysicsSprint
Documentation
=============
These new features still need good docs for the release logs, help
for this is appreciated.
bsystem_time was being called with an extra variable, which was useless. Most of the places that called it, were passing NULL for that variable anyway.
I've also cleaned up that function a bit, but the underlying problems with that part of the code still exist (EVIL GLOBALS that are exported for frame_to_float), for mblur and fields rendering features. That remains for another time.
two separate files, raytrace.c and rayshade.c. The tracing code can now
be used separately from the renderer (will be used in a later commit),
and the raytracing acceleration structure can now also be easily replaced,
if someone wants to experiment with that.
other preview renders at all.
Also added a flag to enable/disable SSS per scene. There is no
button for it yet, the Render panel has no space left .. will find
a place for it later.
The subversion number was also increased to enable the flag for
older .blends.
Metaballs, when in editmode, didnt show correct after a render (it was
drawing render resol then).
The code here was confused some... this works, although it will take a
bit more cpu cycles when render resol = display resol. No biggie.
This means changing the active UV/VCol layers wont change what renders.
needed to adjust the minor version so old files will copy the active layer to the render-uv/vcol layer.
boxpack2d.py - redoen in C now, dont need python version.
An acos() getting a negative value caused 'ray trace shadow bias' to go
wrong (and object render entirely black). Only in very rare cases... but
nevertheless a nice discovery fixing other unpredictable issues.
(Symptom: entire object renders black)
