Removed all the old particle rendering code and options I had in there
before, in order to make way for...
A new procedural texture: 'Point Density'
Point Density is a 3d texture that find the density of a group of 'points'
in space and returns that in the texture as an intensity value. Right now,
its at an early stage and it's only enabled for particles, but it would be
cool to extend it later for things like object vertices, or point cache
files from disk - i.e. to import point cloud data into Blender for
rendering volumetrically.
Currently there are just options for an Object and its particle system
number, this is the particle system that will get cached before rendering,
and then used for the texture's density estimation.
It works totally consistent with as any other procedural texture, so
previously where I've mapped a clouds texture to volume density to make
some of those test renders, now I just map a point density texture to
volume density.
Here's a version of the same particle smoke test file from before, updated
to use the point density texture instead:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/smoke_test02.blend
There are a few cool things about implementing this as a texture:
- The one texture (and cache) can be instanced across many different
materials:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/pointdensity_instanced.png
This means you can calculate and bake one particle system, but render it
multiple times across the scene, with different material settings, at no
extra memory cost.
Right now, the particles are cached in world space, so you have to map it
globally, and if you want it offset, you have to do it in the material (as
in the file above). I plan to add an option to bake in local space, so you
can just map the texture to local and it just works.
- It also works for solid surfaces too, it just gets the density at that
particular point on the surface, eg:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/pointdensity_solid.mov
- You can map it to whatever you want, not only density but the various
emissions and colours as well. I'd like to investigate using the other
outputs in the texture too (like the RGB or normal outputs), perhaps with
options to colour by particle age, generating normals for making particle
'dents' in a surface, whatever!
sure if this is 'correct' but so far in testing it's been working
pretty well.
This also exposes a new 'Nearest' value, to determine how many
nearby particles are taken into account when determining density.
A greater number is more accurate, but slower.
solids, in front of other volumes, etc. Now there's a 'layer depth'
value that works similarly to refraction depth - a limit for how many
times the view ray will penetrate different volumetric surfaces.
I have it close to being able to return alpha, but it's still not 100%
correct and needs a bit more work. Going to sit on this for a while.
Rather than a single absorption value to control how much light is absorbed as it
travels through a volume, there's now an additional absorption colour. This is
used to absorb different R/G/B components of light at different amounts. For
example, if a white light shines on a volume which absorbs green and blue
components, the volume will appear red.
To make it easier to use, the colour set in the UI is actually the inverse of the
absorption colour, so the colour you set is the colour that the volume will
appear as.
Here's an example of how it works:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/vol_col_absorption.jpg
And this can be textured too:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/vol_absorb_textured.png
Keep in mind, this doesn't use accurate spectral light wavelength mixing (just
R/G/B channels) so in cases where the absorption colour is fully red green or
blue, you'll get non-physical results.
Todo: refactor the volume texturing internal interface...
This is an initial commit to get it in SVN and make it easier to work on.
Don't expect it to work perfectly, it's still in development and there's
plenty of work still needing to be done. And so no I'm not very interested
in hearing bug reports or feature requests at this stage :)
There's some info on this, and a todo list at:
http://mke3.net/weblog/volume-rendering/
Right now I'm trying to focus on getting shading working correctly (there's
currently a problem in which 'surfaces' of the volume facing towards or away
from light sources are getting shaded differently to how they should be),
then I'll work on integration issues, like taking materials behind the volume
into account, blending with alpha, etc. You can do simple testing though,
mapping textures to density or emission on a cube with volume material.
the features that are needed to run the game. Compile tested with
scons, make, but not cmake, that seems to have an issue not related
to these changes. The changes include:
* GLSL support in the viewport and game engine, enable in the game
menu in textured draw mode.
* Synced and merged part of the duplicated blender and gameengine/
gameplayer drawing code.
* Further refactoring of game engine drawing code, especially mesh
storage changed a lot.
* Optimizations in game engine armatures to avoid recomputations.
* A python function to get the framerate estimate in game.
* An option take object color into account in materials.
* An option to restrict shadow casters to a lamp's layers.
* Increase from 10 to 18 texture slots for materials, lamps, word.
An extra texture slot shows up once the last slot is used.
* Memory limit for undo, not enabled by default yet because it
needs the .B.blend to be changed.
* Multiple undo for image painting.
* An offset for dupligroups, so not all objects in a group have to
be at the origin.
Fix for bug #7418: texture ipo's didn't show for textures in node materials.
Fix for part of bug #6758: node materials in other node materials could
miss texture coordinates.
=========
- 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/
in EditButtons, panel "Links and Materials", there's now a browse button
to directly assign a material to selected faces. It does:
- check if material was already in one of the 'slots' of the object
- if so, then use this as index to assign
- if not, then add a new slot, and assign the new index
Initial commit of imagebrowser in trunk.
BIG COMMIT!
Main changes:
* completely reworked imasel space
* creation and storage of the preview images for materials, textures, world and lamp
* thumbnails of images and movie files when browsing in the file system
* loading previews from external .blend when linking or appending
* thumbnail caching according to the Thumbnail Managing Standard: http://jens.triq.net/thumbnail-spec/
* for now just kept imasel access mostly as old imgbrowser (CTRL+F4, CTRL+F1) a bit hidden still.
* filtering of file types (images, movies, .blend, py,...)
* preliminary managing of bookmarks ('B' button to add, XKEY while bookmark active to delete)
More detailed info which will be updated here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Elubie/PreviewImageBrowser
Places that need special review (and probably fixes):
* BLO_blendhandle_get_previews in readblenentry
* readfile.c: do_version and refactorings of do_library_append
* UI integration
TODO and known issues still:
* Accented characters do not display correctly with international fonts
* Crash was reported when browsing in directory with movie files
* Bookmark management still needs some UI work (second scrollbar?), feedback here is welcome!
Credits:
Samir Bharadwaj (samirbharadwaj@yahoo.com) for the icon images.
Many thanks to everyone who gave feedback and helped so far!
Material, but relinked the active. Was an old confusing annoying actually.
(And not useful, when do you want 2 material indices with same material?)
Now the 'new' duplicates material, if there is an active material.
Vertex color node worked only if VCol Paint/Light was enabled. Fixed
that, and removed the vertex color node making it part of the geometry
node instead.
Also, preview.blend had black vertex colors for the sphere, so set them
to white like the other primitives.
Node Editor: selecting Material buttons in header crashed, when no buttons
window was opened. Code didn't check for proper window it was called from.
Also: autoname "Cyan" was spelled dutch! :)
The new Material "LightGroups" only worked with lamps in visible layers.
Now also lamps from the group that are not visible are included for
rendering, ensuring that a lightgroup always works on that material,
disregarding layer settings (unless lamp is type 'layer lamp').
Silly: when using vector blur on a curve or text object, without having a
material assigned to it, the default material didn't get initialized OK
for vector blur, causing random streaks.
- Ztransp looked weird in Node previews, only showing the backfacing pixels
- previous change in preview.blend accidentally set camera clipping too low
for correct display of lamp preview
- refresh issue solved in preview when using Node shaders with ray-mirror
By default it is disabled (depth 0.0), so rendering is as usual.
The meaning of "depth" and "falloff" will be extensively shown in the
release log pages. Coming soon!
(Patch provided by Ed Halley)
- Live scanline updates while rendering
Using a timer system, each second now the tiles that are being processed
are checked if they could use display.
To make this work pretty, I had to use the threaded 'tile processor' for
a single thread too, but that's now proven to be stable.
Also note that these updates draw per layer, including ztransp progress
separately from solid render.
- Recode of ztransp OSA
Until now (since blender 1.0) the ztransp part was fully rendered and
added on top of the solid part with alpha-over. This adding was done before
the solid part applied sub-pixel sample filtering, causing the ztransp
layer to be always too blurry.
Now the ztransp layer uses same sub=pixel filter, resulting in the same
AA level (and filter results) as the solid part. Quite noticable with hair
renders.
- Vector buffer support & preliminary vector-blur Node
Using the "Render Layer" panel "Vector" pass button, the motion vectors
per pixel are calculated and stored. Accessible via the Compositor.
The vector-blur node is horrible btw! It just uses the length of the
vector to apply a filter like with current (z)blur. I'm committing it anyway,
I'll experiment with it further, and who knows some surprise code shows up!
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!
- Previews inside groups now get updated too
- Activating nodes inside of groups updates UI and preview render correctly
- Entering/leaving groups updates UI and previewrender
- Material Node: now draws socket name next to colorpicker for inputs
the coordinate outputs now have correct dx/dy vectors for Image AA, and
texture delivers correct intensity, rgb, alpha and normal.
Note; we need a "Vector Mapping" node, to do 2d/3d mapping, like in the
Material "Map In" panel.
**** NEW: Group Nodes
Node trees usually become messy and confusing quickly, so we need
not only a way to collapse Nodes into single 'groups', but also a
way to re-use that data to create libraries of effects.
This has been done by making a new Library data type, the NodeTree.
Everything that has been grouped is stored here, and available for
re-use, appending or linking. These NodeTrees are fully generic,
i.e. can store shader trees, composit trees, and so on. The 'type'
value as stored in the NodeTree will keep track of internal type
definitions and execute/drawing callbacks. Needless to say, re-using
shader trees in a composit tree is a bit useless, and will be
prevented in the browsing code. :)
So; any NodeTree can become a "Goup Node" inside in a NodeTree. This
Group Node then works just like any Node.
To prevent the current code to become too complex, I've disabled
the possibility to insert Groups inside of Groups. That might be
enabled later, but is a real nasty piece of code to get OK.
Since Group Nodes are a dynamic Node type, a lot of work has been
done to ensure Node definitions can be dynamic too, but still allow
to be stored in files, and allow to be verified for type-definition
changes on reloading. This system needs a little bit maturing still,
so the Python gurus should better wait a little bit! (Also for me to
write the definite API docs for it).
What works now:
- Press CTRL+G to create a new Group. The grouping code checks for
impossible selections (like an unselected node between selected nodes).
Everthing that's selected then gets removed from the current tree, and
inserted in a new NodeTree library data block. A Group Node then is
added which links to this new NodeTree.
- Press ALT+G to ungroup. This will not delete the NodeTree library
data, but just duplicate the Group into the current tree.
- Press TAB, or click on the NodeTree icon to edit Groups. Note that
NodeTrees are instances, so editing one Group will also change the
other users.
This also means that when removing nodes in a Group (or hiding sockets
or changing internal links) this is immediately corrected for all users
of this Group, also in other Materials.
- While editing Groups, only the internal Nodes can be edited. A single
click outside of the Group boundary will close this 'edit mode'.
What needs to be done:
- SHIFT+A menu in toolbox style, also including a list of Groups
- Enable the single-user button in the Group Node
- Displaying all (visible) internal group UI elements in the Node Panel
- Enable Library linking and prevent editing of Groups then.
**** NEW: Socket Visibility control
Node types will be generated with a lot of possible inputs or outputs,
and drawing all sockets all the time isn't very useful then.
A new option in the Node header ('plus' icon) allows to either hide all
unused sockets (first keypress) or to reveil them (when there are hidden
sockets, the icon displays black, otherwise it's blended).
Hidden sockets in Nodes also are not exported to a Group, so this way
you can control what options (in/outputs) exactly are available.
To be done:
- a way to hide individual sockets, like with a RMB click on it.
**** NEW: Nodes now render!
This is still quite primitive, more on a level to replace the (now
obsolete and disabled) Material Layers.
What needs to be done:
- make the "Geometry" node work properly, also for AA textures
- make the Texture Node work (does very little at the moment)
- give Material Nodes all inputs as needed (like Map-to Panel)
- find a way to export more data from a Material Node, like the
shadow value, or light intensity only, etc
Very important also to separate from the Material Buttons the
"global" options, like "Ztransp" or "Wire" or "Halo". These can not
be set for each Material-Node individually.
Also note that the Preview Render (Buttons window) now renders a bit
differently. This was a horrid piece of antique code, using a totally
incompatible way of rendering. Target is to fully re-use internal
render code for previews.
OK... that's it mostly. Now test!
First note; this is a WIP project, some commits might change things that
make formerly saved situations not to work identically... like now!
------ New Material integration ------
Until now, the Node system worked on top of the 'current' Material, just
like how the Material Layers worked. That's quite confusing in practice,
especially to see what Material is a Node, or what is the "base material"
Best solution is to completely separate the two. This has been implemented
as follows now;
- The confusing "Input" node has been removed.
- When choosing a Material in Blender, you can define this Material to be
either 'normal' (default) or be the root of a Node tree.
- If a Material is a Node tree, you have to add Nodes in the tree to see
something happen. An empty Node tree doesn't do anything (black).
- If a Material is a Node Tree, the 'data browse' menus show it with an
'N' mark before the name. The 'data block' buttons display it with the
suffix 'NT' (instead of 'MA').
- In a Node Tree, any Material can be inserted, including itself. Only in
that case the Material is being used itself for shading.
UI changes:
Added a new Panel "Links", which shows:
- where the Material is linked to (Object, Mesh, etc)
- if the Material is a NodeTree or not
- the actual active Material in the Tree
The "Node" Panel itself now only shows buttons from the other nodes, when
they are active.
Further the Material Nodes themselves allow browsing and renaming or adding
new Materials now too.
Second half of today's work was cleaning up selection when the Nodes
overlap... it was possible to drag links from invisible sockets, or click
headers for invisible nodes, etc. This because the mouse input code was
not checking for visibility yet.
Works now even for buttons. :)
********* Node editor work:
- To enable Nodes for Materials, you have to set the "Use Nodes"
button, in the new Material buttons "Nodes" Panel or in header
of the Node editor. Doing this will disable Material-Layers.
- Nodes now execute materials ("shaders"), but still only using the
previewrender code.
- Nodes have (optional) previews for rendered images.
- Node headers allow to hide buttons and/or preview image
- Nodes can be dragged larger/smaller (right-bottom corner)
- Nodes can be hidden (minimized) with hotkey H
- CTRL+click on an Input Socket gives a popup with default values.
- Changing Material/Texture or Mix node will adjust Node title.
- Click-drag outside of a Node changes cursor to "Knife' and allows to
draw a rect where to cut Links.
- Added new node types RGBtoBW, Texture, In/Output, ColorRamp
- Material Nodes have options to ouput diffuse or specular, or to use
a negative normal. The input socket 'Normal' will force the material
to use that normal, otherwise it uses the normal from the Material
that has the node tree.
- When drawing a link between two not-matching sockets, Blender inserts
a converting node (now only for value/rgb combos)
- When drawing a link to an input socket that's already in use, the
old link will either disappear or flip to another unused socket.
- A click on a Material Node will activate it, and show all its settings
in the Material Buttons. Active Material Nodes draw the material icon
in red.
- A click on any node will show its options in the Node Panel in the
Material buttons.
- Multiple Output Nodes can be used, to sample contents of a tree, but
only one Output is the real one, which is indicated in a different
color and red material icon.
- Added ThemeColors for node types
- ALT+C will convert existing Material-Layers to Node... this currently
only adds the material/mix nodes and connects them. Dunno if this is
worth a lot of coding work to make perfect?
- Press C to call another "Solve order", which will show all possible
cyclic conflicts (if there are).
- Technical: nodes now use "Type" structs which define the
structure of nodes and in/output sockets. The Type structs store all
fixed info, callbacks, and allow to reconstruct saved Nodes to match
what is required by Blender.
- Defining (new) nodes now is as simple as filling in a fixed
Type struct, plus code some callbacks. A doc will be made!
- Node preview images are by default float
********* Icon drawing:
- Cleanup of how old icons were implemented in new system, making
them 16x16 too, correctly centered *and* scaled.
- Made drawing Icons use float coordinates
- Moved BIF_calcpreview_image() into interface_icons.c, renamed it
icon_from_image(). Removed a lot of unneeded Imbuf magic here! :)
- Skipped scaling and imbuf copying when icons are OK size
********* Preview render:
- Huge cleanup of code....
- renaming BIF_xxx calls that only were used internally
- BIF_previewrender() now accepts an argument for rendering method,
so it supports icons, buttonwindow previewrender and node editor
- Only a single BIF_preview_changed() call now exists, supporting all
signals as needed for buttos and node editor
********* More stuff:
- glutil.c, glaDrawPixelsSafe() and glaDrawPixelsTex() now accept format
argument for GL_FLOAT rects
- Made the ColorBand become a built-in button for interface.c
Was a load of cleanup work in buttons_shading.c...
- removed a load of unneeded glBlendFunc() calls
- Fixed bug in calculating text length for buttons (ancient!)
