This feature takes some inspiration from
"RenderMan: An Advanced Path Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering" and
"A Hierarchical Automatic Stopping Condition for Monte Carlo Global Illumination"
The basic principle is as follows:
While samples are being added to a pixel, the adaptive sampler writes half
of the samples to a separate buffer. This gives it two separate estimates
of the same pixel, and by comparing their difference it estimates convergence.
Once convergence drops below a given threshold, the pixel is considered done.
When a pixel has not converged yet and needs more samples than the minimum,
its immediate neighbors are also set to take more samples. This is done in order
to more reliably detect sharp features such as caustics. A 3x3 box filter that
is run periodically over the tile buffer is used for that purpose.
After a tile has finished rendering, the values of all passes are scaled as if
they were rendered with the full number of samples. This way, any code operating
on these buffers, for example the denoiser, does not need to be changed for
per-pixel sample counts.
Reviewed By: brecht, #cycles
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D4686
This allows for extra output passes that encode automatic object and material masks
for the entire scene. It is an implementation of the Cryptomatte standard as
introduced by Psyop. A good future extension would be to add a manifest to the
export and to do plenty of testing to ensure that it is fully compatible with other
renderers and compositing programs that use Cryptomatte.
Internally, it adds the ability for Cycles to have several passes of the same type
that are distinguished by their name.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3538
While unlikely to have had any serious effects because of limited use, the
previous implementation was not actually atomic due to a data race and
incorrectly coded CAS loop. We also had duplicates of this code in a few
places, it's now been moved to a single location with all other atomic
operations.
This inconsistency drove me totally crazy, it's really confusing
when it's inconsistent especially when you work on both Cycles and
Blender sides.
Shouldn;t cause merge PITA, it's whitespace changes only, Git should
be able to merge it nicely.