Most of the changes are related to adding support for motion data throughout
the code. There's some code for actual camera/object motion blur raytracing
but it's unfinished (it badly slows down the raytracing kernel even when the
option is turned off), so that code it disabled still.
Motion vector export from Blender tries to avoid computing derived meshes
when the mesh does not have a deforming modifier, and it also won't store
motion vectors for every vertex if only the object or camera is moving.
=== BVH build time optimizations ===
* BVH building was multithreaded. Not all building is multithreaded, packing
and the initial bounding/splitting is still single threaded, but recursive
splitting is, which was the main bottleneck.
* Object splitting now uses binning rather than sorting of all elements, using
code from the Embree raytracer from Intel.
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/embree-photo-realistic-ray-tracing-kernels/
* Other small changes to avoid allocations, pack memory more tightly, avoid
some unnecessary operations, ...
These optimizations do not work yet when Spatial Splits are enabled, for that
more work is needed. There's also other optimizations still needed, in
particular for the case of many low poly objects, the packing step and node
memory allocation.
BVH raytracing time should remain about the same, but BVH build time should be
significantly reduced, test here show speedup of about 5x to 10x on a dual core
and 5x to 25x on an 8-core machine, depending on the scene.
=== Threads ===
Centralized task scheduler for multithreading, which is basically the
CPU device threading code wrapped into something reusable.
Basic idea is that there is a single TaskScheduler that keeps a pool of threads,
one for each core. Other places in the code can then create a TaskPool that they
can drop Tasks in to be executed by the scheduler, and wait for them to complete
or cancel them early.
=== Normal ====
Added a Normal output to the texture coordinate node. This currently
gives the object space normal, which is the same under object animation.
In the future this might become a "generated" normal so it's also stable for
deforming objects, but for now it's already useful for non-deforming objects.
=== Render Layers ===
Per render layer Samples control, leaving it to 0 will use the common scene
setting.
Environment pass will now render environment even if film is set to transparent.
Exclude Layers" added. Scene layers (all object that influence the render,
directly or indirectly) are shared between all render layers. However sometimes
it's useful to leave out some object influence for a particular render layer.
That's what this option allows you to do.
=== Filter Glossy ===
When using a value higher than 0.0, this will blur glossy reflections after
blurry bounces, to reduce noise at the cost of accuracy. 1.0 is a good
starting value to tweak.
Some light paths have a low probability of being found while contributing much
light to the pixel. As a result these light paths will be found in some pixels
and not in others, causing fireflies. An example of such a difficult path might
be a small light that is causing a small specular highlight on a sharp glossy
material, which we are seeing through a rough glossy material. With path tracing
it is difficult to find the specular highlight, but if we increase the roughness
on the material the highlight gets bigger and softer, and so easier to find.
Often this blurring will be hardly noticeable, because we are seeing it through
a blurry material anyway, but there are also cases where this will lead to a
loss of detail in lighting.
correct with instancing.
Actually such object will not work in many places, e.g. transforming vertices
in edit mode doesn't work and textures will be misapplied in Blender Internal,
so these should be avoided.
* Reverted the general activation of __KERNEL_SHADING__.
Better to handle this in the device file. This way each platform gets specifically what it is capable of atm.
* Nvidia has Shading + Multi Closure
* AMD (Apple) has only Clay Render
* AMD (non Apple) has Basic Shading
* Enable __KERNEL_SHADING__ per default for OpenCL.
This enables basic shading (color, emission, textures...) for AMD cards.
You need the latest AMD catalyst driver in order to have this work.
but this makes it more reliable for now.
Also add an integrator "Clamp" option, to clamp very light samples to a maximum
value. This will reduce accuracy but may help reducing noise and speed up
convergence.
emitting objects or world lighting do not contribute to the shadow pass.
Consider this more as a pass useful for some compositing tricks, unlike
other lighting passes this pass can't be used to exactly reconstruct the
combined pass.
