- spelling - turns out we had tessellation spelt wrong all over.
- use \directive for doxy (not @directive)
- remove BLI_sparsemap.h - was from bmesh merge IIRC but entire file commented and not used.
This adds a few settings to control global render quality, for faster
renders when tweaking lighting etc. The implementation is not so great,
and this should really be part of a proper render profile and preset
system. So for now it's a hidden Peach feature, enabled by setting rt
to 1. Before the next release, I'll either remove or improve it.
Settings are:
- Maximum subsurf level
- Child particles percentage
- Maximum shadow map samples
- AO and SSS quality factor
Lampbuffers require painful bias tweaking (to prevent aliasing or to
get shadow detail). Sometimes you want this different per object, like
for gras you want less shadow detail, but for the ground you want high
detail. This feature allows to tweak it.
The new "LBias" slider is in shader panel, bottom. Ugly! But, thats for
later...
===============================
- 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.
Full log:
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Irregular_Shadow_Buffe.785.0.html
In short: this is a shadow buffer approach that always results in crispy
shadows, independent of lamp buffer size or zoom level. This shadow buffer
system also supports transparent shadow.
This is part of work on refreshing Shadow Buffers in Blender. You now can
choose of two types (Classical, Irregular). More types will follow. Also
quality issues for Classical shadow buffers are going to be reviewed,
especially to solve the lousy Biasing.
For the CVS log record; it is based on articles:
Gregory Johnson et al, University of Texas, Austin. (Regular grid method).
Timo Aila and Samuli Laine, Helsinki University of Technology. (BSP method).
sampling have been activated for UI. Check the pictures here:
http://www.blender.org/bf/filters/index2.html
I also did do tests with anti-aliased shadowbuffers:
http://www.blender.org/bf/filters/index3.html
But this needs more thinking over still...
A full detailed description of this will be done later... is several days
of work. Here's a summary:
Render:
- Full cleanup of render code, removing *all* globals and bad level calls
all over blender. Render module is now not called abusive anymore
- API-fied calls to rendering
- Full recode of internal render pipeline. Is now rendering tiles by
default, prepared for much smarter 'bucket' render later.
- Each thread now can render a full part
- Renders were tested with 4 threads, goes fine, apart from some lookup
tables in softshadow and AO still
- Rendering is prepared to do multiple layers and passes
- No single 32 bits trick in render code anymore, all 100% floats now.
Writing images/movies
- moved writing images to blender kernel (bye bye 'schrijfplaatje'!)
- made a new Movie handle system, also in kernel. This will enable much
easier use of movies in Blender
PreviewRender:
- Using new render API, previewrender (in buttons) now uses regular render
code to generate images.
- new datafile 'preview.blend.c' has the preview scenes in it
- previews get rendered in exact displayed size (1 pixel = 1 pixel)
3D Preview render
- new; press Pkey in 3d window, for a panel that continuously renders
(pkey is for games, i know... but we dont do that in orange now!)
- this render works nearly identical to buttons-preview render, so it stops
rendering on any event (mouse, keyboard, etc)
- on moving/scaling the panel, the render code doesn't recreate all geometry
- same for shifting/panning view
- all other operations (now) regenerate the full render database still.
- this is WIP... but big fun, especially for simple scenes!
Compositor
- Using same node system as now in use for shaders, you can composit images
- works pretty straightforward... needs much more options/tools and integration
with rendering still
- is not threaded yet, nor is so smart to only recalculate changes... will be
done soon!
- the "Render Result" node will get all layers/passes as output sockets
- The "Output" node renders to a builtin image, which you can view in the Image
window. (yes, output nodes to render-result, and to files, is on the list!)
The Bad News
- "Unified Render" is removed. It might come back in some stage, but this
system should be built from scratch. I can't really understand this code...
I expect it is not much needed, especially with advanced layer/passes
control
- Panorama render, Field render, Motion blur, is not coded yet... (I had to
recode every single feature in render, so...!)
- Lens Flare is also not back... needs total revision, might become composit
effect though (using zbuffer for visibility)
- Part render is gone! (well, thats obvious, its default now).
- The render window is only restored with limited functionality... I am going
to check first the option to render to a Image window, so Blender can become
a true single-window application. :)
For example, the 'Spare render buffer' (jkey) doesnt work.
- Render with border, now default creates a smaller image
- No zbuffers are written yet... on the todo!
- Scons files and MSVC will need work to get compiling again
OK... thats what I can quickly recall. Now go compiling!
Render:
- New; support for dual CPU render (SDL thread)
Currently only works with alternating scanlines, but gives excellent
performance. For both normal render as unified implemented.
Note the "mutex" locks on z-transp buffer render and imbuf loads.
- This has been made possible by major cleanups in render code, especially
getting rid of globals (example Tin Tr Tg Tb Ta for textures) or struct
OSA or using Materials or Texture data to write to.
- Made normal render fully 4x32 floats too, and removed all old optimizes
with chars or shorts.
- Made normal render and unified render use same code for sky and halo
render, giving equal (and better) results for halo render. Old render
now also uses PostProcess options (brightness, mul, gamma)
- Added option ("FBuf") in F10 Output Panel, this keeps a 4x32 bits buffer
after render. Using PostProcess menu you will note an immediate re-
display of image too (32 bits RGBA)
- Added "Hue" and "Saturation" sliders to PostProcess options
- Render module is still not having a "nice" API, but amount of dependencies
went down a lot. Next todo: remove abusive "previewrender" code.
The last main global in Render (struct Render) now can be re-used for fully
controlling a render, to allow multiple "instances" of render to open.
- Renderwindow now displays a smal bar on top with the stats, and keeps the
stats after render too. Including "spare" page support.
Not only easier visible that way, but also to remove the awkward code that
was drawing stats in the Info header (extreme slow on some ATIs too)
- Cleaned up blendef.h and BKE_utildefines.h, these two had overlapping
defines.
- I might have forgotten stuff... and will write a nice doc on the architecture!
Main target was to make the inner rendering loop using no globals anymore.
This is essential for proper usage while raytracing, it caused a lot of
hacks in the raycode as well, which even didn't work correctly for all
situations (textures especially).
Done this by creating a new local struct RenderInput, which replaces usage
of the global struct Render R. The latter now only is used to denote
image size, viewmatrix, and the like.
Making the inner render loops using no globals caused 1000s of vars to
be changed... but the result definitely is much nicer code, which enables
making 'real' shaders in a next stage.
It also enabled me to remove the hacks from ray.c
Then i went to the task of removing redundant code. Especially the calculus
of texture coords took place (identical) in three locations.
Most obvious is the change in the unified render part, which is much less
code now; it uses the same rendering routines as normal render now.
(Note; not for halos yet!)
I also removed 6 files called 'shadowbuffer' something. This was experimen-
tal stuff from NaN days. And again saved a lot of double used code.
Finally I went over the blenkernel and blender/src calls to render stuff.
Here the same local data is used now, resulting in less dependency.
I also moved render-texture to the render module, this was still in Kernel.
(new file: texture.c)
So! After this commit I will check on the autofiles, to try to fix that.
MSVC people have to do it themselves.
This commit will need quite some testing help, but I'm around!
(adding)
#ifdef HAVE_CONFIG_H
#include <config.h>
#endif
also the Makefile.in's were from previous patch adding
the system depend stuff to configure.ac
Kent
--
mein@cs.umn.edu
