=================
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.
Fixed very old annoyance in alpha render: when using alpha textures images,
nicely premulled as Blender wants it, you still got dark outlines at the
edges. This because the blender shading pipeline also premultiplies.
Solution: de-premul image texture colors after sampling.
distorted copy of the original face normal, meaning that on
smooth shaded faces, sometimes the check to keep rays
reflected out away from the face wasn't working, and the ray
would intersect when it shouldn't.
This is an additional option for 'TexFace', which uses the alpha of
the UV assigned faces as well as the colour. It appears in material
buttons as a little 'A' button next to 'TexFace', when 'TexFace is
switched on. It's a bit horrible, but no point tweaking that layout in
isolation at this stage.
This image is using texface alpha, with different assigned images, all
sharing the one material:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/texface_alpha.jpg
Usually I consider texface (and teaching people to use it for UV
mapping) to be pretty evil, but in some cases, when you have lots of
separate images that you want to control in the one material, it can
be quite handy.
This is a new feature that can make using AO a lot more attractive when rendering
animations with vector blur. It uses the speed vector info calculated in the 'Vec'
speed vector pass, in order to reduce AO samples where pixels are moving more
quickly. There's not much point calculating all those AO samples when the result is
going to be smeared anyway, so you can save a bit of render time by doing
a more noisy render in those areas.
You can use this with a new slider in the Adaptive QMC settings 'Adapt Vec'. The
higher the value, the more aggressively it will reduce samples. 0.0 means no
reduction, and 1.0 reduces one sample per pixel of average displacement for that
pixel. 0.25 or so generally gives decent results, but it depends on how fast things
are moving.
Here's a demo (compare the final blurred result, and render times):
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/raytracing/adapt_speed_off2.jpghttp://mke3.net/blender/devel/raytracing/adapt_speed_on2.jpg
And a less contrived example, a short clip from macouno's 'petunia' bconf animation:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/raytracing/petunia-adaptvec-noblur-h264.movhttp://mke3.net/blender/devel/raytracing/petunia-adaptvec-blur-h264.mov
This occurred when using qmc shadows, full OSA, and sss - it was
assuming full OSA was being used, even when (during the SSS prepass)
osa is set to 0.
Fixed by tightening up the checks for full OSA.
For the record, I think the way these reflection and refraction passes are handled (as a difference against the diffuse pass) is not very useful - especially if you want to do colour corrections, blurring, etc. It would be much more practical for the passes to contain the ray result returned by the raytrace...
* stupid misplacement of declaration
* replacing fmodf with fmod (fmodf not available with MSVC7.1 when compiling C-code)
* appending CXXFLAGS to CCFLAGS in tools/Blender.py to avoid linking errors with runtime library (/MT not set)
- jesterKing, could you please check if that's ok?
reflecting/refracting materials with ray shadows. Fully glossy
materials get Full OSA on automatically, so extra redundant samples
were being calculated for the shadows. This has now been fixed by
reducing the shadow samples accordingly if Full OSA is on.
Thanks to Benjamin Thery who notified me of this!
for shading if their 'visibility factor' is below 0.001. This
gives no perceptible visual difference in my tests, but can
significantly speed up shading when using lots of omni lights
with quad falloff over a large area. Since quad lamps never
actually fall off to 0, previously every lamp would be considered
for shading each pixel, even if such lamps had a tiny falloff
distance, and were miles away.
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.
Previous bugfix of spec not being included in only shadow lamps had 2 errors.
There weren't any checks for if shi->spec and shi->shad go below 0 because of
an only shadow lamp, and also the code for including spec in only shadow lamps
was slightly wrong.
caused errors on only shadow lamps; fixed this by adding back in the original
intensity > 0.0 check in the only shadow if statement, where it belonged in the
first place.
In addition, the specular pass was not correctly affected by only shadow lamps,
severely reducing the usefulness of this feature. For example, using four
spotlamps to create an omnidirectional buffered shadow lamp didn't work.
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.
- Multilayer EXR files:
Rendering without "do composite" skipped to render the vector pass
- Also found a wrong loop, missing to clear speed vectors in the first
pixel of a tile, causing error print:
"Found uninitialized speed in vector buffer... fixed"
For some odd reason, shadow calculation was skipped if diffuse was 0.0. This
however would cause errors where specularity would ignore shadows. After all,
just because the shaded diffuse of a point is fully black, doesn't mean
the specularity highlight doesn't include that point.
Ton: you might want to look at this, though it's just a one-liner.
