The problem here is that whether an object is a shadow catcher or not affects the
visibility flags, but changes to the shadow catcher property did not trigger a
visibility flag update.
When rendering in the viewport (or probably on instanced objects, but I didn't
test that), emissive objects whose scale is negative give the wrong value on the
"backfacing" input when multiple sampling is enabled.
The underlying problem was a corner case in how normal transformation is handled,
which is generally a bit messy.
From what I can tell, the pattern appears to be:
- If you first transform vertices to world space and then compute the normal from
them (as triangle light samping, MNEE and light tree do), you need to flip
whenever the transform has negative scale regardless of whether the transform
has been applied
- If you compute the normal in object space and then transform it to world space
(as the regular shader_setup_from_ray path does), you only need to flip if the
transform was already applied and was negative
- If you get the normal from a local intersection result (as bevel and SSS do),
you only need to flip if the transform was already applied and was negative
- If you get the normal from vertex normals, you don't need to do anything since
the host-side code does the flip for you (arguably it'd be more consistent to
do this in the kernel as well, but meh, not worth the potential slowdown)
So, this patch fixes the logic in the triangle emission code.
Also, turns out that the MNEE code had the same problem and was also having
problems in the viewport on negative-scale objects, this is also fixed now.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16952
Uses a light tree to more effectively sample scenes with many lights. This can
significantly reduce noise, at the cost of a somewhat longer render time per
sample.
Light tree sampling is enabled by default. It can be disabled in the Sampling >
Lights panel. Scenes using light clamping or ray visibility tricks may render
different as these are biased techniques that depend on the sampling strategy.
The implementation is currently disabled on AMD HIP. This is planned to be fixed
before the release.
Implementation by Jeffrey Liu, Weizhen Huang, Alaska and Brecht Van Lommel.
Ref T77889
Materials now have an enum to set the emission sampling method, to be
either None, Auto, Front, Back or Front & Back. This replace the
previous "Multiple Importance Sample" option.
Auto is the new default, and uses a heuristic to estimate the emitted
light intensity to determine of the mesh should be considered as a light
for sampling. Shaders sometimes have a bit of emission but treating them
as a light source is not worth the memory/performance overhead.
The Front/Back settings are not important yet, but will help when a
light tree is added. In that case setting emission to Front only on
closed meshes can help ignore emission from inside the mesh interior that
does not contribute anything.
Includes contributions by Brecht Van Lommel and Alaska.
Ref T77889
This patch unifies the names of math functions for different data types and uses
overloading instead. The goal is to make it possible to swap out all the float3
variables containing RGB data with something else, with as few as possible
changes to the code. It's a requirement for future spectral rendering patches.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15276
This patch makes it possible to change the precision with which to
store volume data in the NanoVDB data structure (as float, half, or
using variable bit quantization) via the previously unused precision
field in the volume data block.
It makes it possible to further reduce memory usage during
rendering, at a slight cost to the visual detail of a volume.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D10023
This adds support for rendering motion blur for volumes, using their
velocity field. This works for fluid simulations and imported VDB
volumes. For the latter, the name of the velocity field can be set per
volume object, with automatic detection of velocity fields that are
split into 3 scalar grids.
A new parameter is also added to scale velocity for more artistic control.
Like for Alembic and USD caches, a parameter to set the unit of time in
which the velocity vectors are expressed is also added. For Blender gas
simulations, the velocity unit should always be in seconds, so this is
only exposed for volume objects which may come from external OpenVDB
files.
These parameters are available under the `Render` panels for the fluid
domain and the volume object data properties respectively.
Credits: kernel advection code from Tangent Animation's Blackbird based
on earlier work by Geraldine Chua
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D14629
Light groups are a type of pass that only contains lighting from a subset of light sources.
They are created in the View layer, and light sources (lamps, objects with emissive materials
and/or the environment) can be assigned to a group.
Currently, each light group ends up generating its own version of the Combined pass.
In the future, additional types of passes (e.g. shadowcatcher) might be getting their own
per-lightgroup versions.
The lightgroup creation and assignment is not Cycles-specific, so Eevee or external render
engines could make use of it in the future.
Note that Lightgroups are identified by their name - therefore, the name of the Lightgroup
in the View Layer and the name that's set in an object's settings must match for it to be
included.
Currently, changing a Lightgroup's name does not update objects - this is planned for the
future, along with other features such as denoising for light groups and viewing them in
preview renders.
Original patch by Alex Fuller (@mistaed), with some polishing by Lukas Stockner (@lukasstockner97).
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12871
This adds support for selective rendering of caustics in shadows of refractive
objects. Example uses are rendering of underwater caustics and eye caustics.
This is based on "Manifold Next Event Estimation", a method developed for
production rendering. The idea is to selectively enable shadow caustics on a
few objects in the scene where they have a big visual impact, without impacting
render performance for the rest of the scene.
The Shadow Caustic option must be manually enabled on light, caustic receiver
and caster objects. For such light paths, the Filter Glossy option will be
ignored and replaced by sharp caustics.
Currently this method has a various limitations:
* Only caustics in shadows of refractive objects work, which means no caustics
from reflection or caustics that outside shadows. Only up to 4 refractive
caustic bounces are supported.
* Caustic caster objects should have smooth normals.
* Not currently support for Metal GPU rendering.
In the future this method may be extended for more general caustics.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
This code adds manifold next event estimation through refractive surface(s) as a
new sampling technique for direct lighting, i.e. finding the point on the
refractive surface(s) along the path to a light sample, which satisfies Fermat's
principle for a given microfacet normal and the path's end points. This
technique involves walking on the "specular manifold" using a pseudo newton
solver. Such a manifold is defined by the specular constraint matrix from the
manifold exploration framework [2]. For each refractive interface, this
constraint is defined by enforcing that the generalized half-vector projection
onto the interface local tangent plane is null. The newton solver guides the
walk by linearizing the manifold locally before reprojecting the linear solution
onto the refractive surface. See paper [1] for more details about the technique
itself and [3] for the half-vector light transport formulation, from which it is
derived.
[1] Manifold Next Event Estimation
Johannes Hanika, Marc Droske, and Luca Fascione. 2015.
Comput. Graph. Forum 34, 4 (July 2015), 87–97.
https://jo.dreggn.org/home/2015_mnee.pdf
[2] Manifold exploration: a Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique for rendering
scenes with difficult specular transport Wenzel Jakob and Steve Marschner.
2012. ACM Trans. Graph. 31, 4, Article 58 (July 2012), 13 pages.
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/manifolds-sg12/
[3] The Natural-Constraint Representation of the Path Space for Efficient
Light Transport Simulation. Anton S. Kaplanyan, Johannes Hanika, and Carsten
Dachsbacher. 2014. ACM Trans. Graph. 33, 4, Article 102 (July 2014), 13 pages.
https://cg.ivd.kit.edu/english/HSLT.php
The code for this samping technique was inserted at the light sampling stage
(direct lighting). If the walk is successful, it turns off path regularization
using a specialized flag in the path state (PATH_MNEE_SUCCESS). This flag tells
the integrator not to blur the brdf roughness further down the path (in a child
ray created from BSDF sampling). In addition, using a cascading mechanism of
flag values, we cull connections to caustic lights for this and children rays,
which should be resolved through MNEE.
This mechanism also cancels the MIS bsdf counter part at the casutic receiver
depth, in essence leaving MNEE as the only sampling technique from receivers
through refractive casters to caustic lights. This choice might not be optimal
when the light gets large wrt to the receiver, though this is usually not when
you want to use MNEE.
This connection culling strategy removes a fair amount of fireflies, at the cost
of introducing a slight bias. Because of the selective nature of the culling
mechanism, reflective caustics still benefit from the native path
regularization, which further removes fireflies on other surfaces (bouncing
light off casters).
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13533
An alpha component can be specified for an object's color. This adds an alpha
socket to the object info shader node allowing for the alpha component of the
object's color to be accessed in the shader editor.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D14141
* Replace license text in headers with SPDX identifiers.
* Remove specific license info from outdated readme.txt, instead leave details
to the source files.
* Add list of SPDX license identifiers used, and corresponding license texts.
* Update copyright dates while we're at it.
Ref D14069, T95597
This add support for rendering of the point cloud object in Blender, as a native
geometry type in Cycles that is more memory and time efficient than instancing
sphere meshes. This can be useful for rendering sand, water splashes, particles,
motion graphics, etc.
Points are currently always rendered as spheres, with backface culling. More
shapes are likely to be added later, but this is the most important one and can
be customized with shaders.
For CPU rendering the Embree primitive is used, for GPU there is our own
intersection code. Motion blur is suppored. Volumes inside points are not
currently supported.
Implemented with help from:
* Kévin Dietrich: Alembic procedural integration
* Patrick Mourse: OptiX integration
* Josh Whelchel: update for cycles-x changes
Ref T92573
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D9887
This fixes crash T94022 when selecting live viewport render with both GPU & CPU devices selected. It is caused by incorrect `KernelBVHLayout` assignment. Similar to `BVH_LAYOUT_MULTI_OPTIX` for Optix, this patch adds a `BVH_LAYOUT_MULTI_METAL` to correctly redirect to the correct Metal BVH layout type.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13561
This patch adds MetalRT support to Cycles kernel code. It is mostly additive in nature or confined to Metal-specific code, however there are a few areas where this interacts with other code:
- MetalRT closely follows the Optix implementation, and in some cases (notably handling of transforms) it makes sense to extend Optix special-casing to MetalRT. For these generalisations we now have `__KERNEL_GPU_RAYTRACING__` instead of `__KERNEL_OPTIX__`.
- MetalRT doesn't support primitive offsetting (as with `primitiveIndexOffset` in Optix), so we define and populate a new kernel texture, `__object_prim_offset`, containing per-object primitive / curve-segment offsets. This is referenced and applied in MetalRT intersection handlers.
- Two new BVH layout enum values have been added: `BVH_LAYOUT_METAL` and `BVH_LAYOUT_MULTI_METAL_EMBREE` for XPU mode). Some host-side enum case handling has been updated where it is trivial to do so.
Ref T92212
Reviewed By: brecht
Maniphest Tasks: T92212
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13353
Remove prefix of filenames that is the same as the folder name. This used
to help when #includes were using individual files, but now they are always
relative to the cycles root directory and so the prefixes are redundant.
For patches and branches, git merge and rebase should be able to detect the
renames and move over code to the right file.
* Split render/ into scene/ and session/. The scene/ folder now contains the
scene and its nodes. The session/ folder contains the render session and
associated data structures like drivers and render buffers.
* Move top level kernel headers into new folders kernel/camera/, kernel/film/,
kernel/light/, kernel/sample/, kernel/util/
* Move integrator related kernel headers into kernel/integrator/
* Move OSL shaders from kernel/shaders/ to kernel/osl/shaders/
For patches and branches, git merge and rebase should be able to detect the
renames and move over code to the right file.
