This includes much improved GPU rendering performance, viewport interactivity,
new shadow catcher, revamped sampling settings, subsurface scattering anisotropy,
new GPU volume sampling, improved PMJ sampling pattern, and more.
Some features have also been removed or changed, breaking backwards compatibility.
Including the removal of the OpenCL backend, for which alternatives are under
development.
Release notes and code docs:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.0/Cycleshttps://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source/Render/Cycles
Credits:
* Sergey Sharybin
* Brecht Van Lommel
* Patrick Mours (OptiX backend)
* Christophe Hery (subsurface scattering anisotropy)
* William Leeson (PMJ sampling pattern)
* Alaska (various fixes and tweaks)
* Thomas Dinges (various fixes)
For the full commit history, see the cycles-x branch. This squashes together
all the changes since intermediate changes would often fail building or tests.
Ref T87839, T87837, T87836
Fixes T90734, T89353, T80267, T80267, T77185, T69800
Previously fluid simulation and Alembic modifiers had a dedicated function
to query the velocity for motion blur. Now use a more generic system where
those modifiers output a velocity attribute.
Advantages:
* Geometry and particle nodes can output velocity through the same mechanism,
or read the attribute coming from earlier modifiers.
* The velocity can be preserved through modifiers like subdivision surface or
auto smooth.
* USD and Alembic previously only output velocity from fluid simulation, now
they work with velocity from other sources too.
* Simplifies the code for renderers like Cycles and exporters like
Alembic and USD.
This breaks compatibility:
* External renderers and exporters accessing these velocities through the
Python API now need to use the attribute instead.
* Existing modifier node setups that create an attribute named "velocity"
will render differently with motion blur.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12305
Previously, the Point Instance node in geometry nodes could only instance
existing objects or collections. The reason was that large parts of Blender
worked under the assumption that objects are the main unit of instancing.
Now we also want to instance geometry within an object, so a slightly larger
refactor was necessary.
This should not affect files that do not use the new kind of instances.
The main change is a redefinition of what "instanced data" is. Now, an
instances is a cow-object + object-data (the geometry). This can be nicely
seen in `struct DupliObject`. This allows the same object to generate
multiple geometries of different types which can be instanced individually.
A nice side effect of this refactor is that having multiple geometry components
is not a special case in the depsgraph object iterator anymore, because those
components are integrated with the `DupliObject` system.
Unfortunately, different systems that work with instances in Blender (e.g.
render engines and exporters) often work under the assumption that objects are
the main unit of instancing. So those have to be updated as well to be able to
handle the new instances. This patch updates Cycles, EEVEE and other viewport
engines. Exporters have not been updated yet. Some minimal (not master-ready)
changes to update the obj and alembic exporters can be found in P2336 and P2335.
Different file formats may want to handle these new instances in different ways.
For users, the only thing that changed is that the Point Instance node now
has a geometry mode.
This also fixes T88454.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D11841
This adds a setting to enable data caching, and another one to set the
maximum cache size in megabytes.
When caching is enabled we load the data for the entire animation in
memory, as we already do, however, if the data exceeds the memory limit,
render is aborted.
When caching is disabled, we simply load the data for the current frame
in memory.
Ref D10197
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D11163
As subdivision objects are first class citizens in Alembic, to
differentiate them with non-subdivided polygon meshes, the Alembic
Procedural automatically sets up subdivision properties on the generated
Cycles Mesh.
However, for real-time playback subdivision is far too slow, so this
modifies the detection of a MeshSeqCache modifier used to activate the
procedural to allow for a Subsurf modifier right after the cache one. If
present, the procedural will tag the object for subdivision, if absent, the
object will be treated as a regular mesh.
This is a temporary measure for until subdivision surface settings are part
of the Mesh datablock (see T68891).
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D11162
This patch exposes the Cycles Alembic Procedural through the MeshSequenceCache
modifier in order to use and test it from Blender.
To enable it, one has to switch the render feature set to experimental and
activate the Procedural in the modifier. An Alembic Procedural is then
created for each CacheFile from Blender set to use the Procedural, and each
Blender object having a MeshSequenceCache modifier is added to list of objects
of the right procedural.
The procedural's parameters derive from the CacheFile's properties which are
already exposed in the UI through the modifier, although more Cycles specific
options might be added in the future.
As there is currently no cache controls and since we load all the data at the
beginning of the render session, the procedural is only available during
viewport renders at the moment. When an Alembic procedural is rendered, data
from the archive are not read on the Blender side.
If a Cycles render is not active and the CacheFile is set to use the Cycles Procedural,
bounding boxes are used to display the objects in the scene as a signal that the
objects are not processed by Blender anymore. This is standard in other DCCs.
However this does not reduce the memory usage from Blender as the Alembic data
was already loaded either during an import or during a .blend file read.
This is mostly a hack to test the Cycles Alembic procedural until we have a
better Blender side mechanism for letting renderers load their own geometry,
which will be based on import and export settings on Collections (T68933).
Ref T79174, D3089
Reviewed By: brecht, sybren
Maniphest Tasks: T79174
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D10197
The immediate reason for this is that we want to be able to initialize them
to different defaults for light objects, which is hard with Python properties.
But in general it is useful to be able to share these with other renderers.
As a side effect, Eevee now supports a per-object holdout instead of only
per-collection.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12133
The goal: allow to easily use AO approximation in scenes which combines
both small and large scale objects.
The idea: use per-object AO distance which will allow to override world
settings. Instancer object will "propagate" its AO distance to all its
instances unless the instance defines own distance (this allows to
modify AO distance in the shot files, without requiring to modify props
used in the shots.
Available from the new Fats GI Approximation panel in object properties.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12112
Offset rays from the flat surface to match where they would be for a smooth
surface as specified by the normals. In the shading panel there is now a
Shading Offset (existing option) and Geometry Offset (new).
The Geometry Offset works as follows:
* 0: disabled
* 0.001: only terminated triangles (normal points to the light, geometry
doesn't) are affected
* 0.1 (default): triangles at grazing angles are affected, and the effect
fades out
* 1: all triangles are affected
Limitations:
* The artifact is still visible in some cases, it could be that some quads
require to be treated specifically as quads.
* Inconsistent normals cause artifacts.
* If small objects cast shadows to a big low poly surface, the shadows can
appear to be in a wrong place - because the surface moved slightly above
the geometry. This can be noticed only at grazing angles to light.
* Approximated surfaces of two non-intersecting low-poly objects can overlap
that causes off-the-wall shadows.
Generally, using one or a few levels of subdivision can get rid of artifacts
faster than before.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D11065
This adds a reference count to Nodes which is incremented or decremented
whenever they are added to or removed from a socket, which will help us
track used Nodes throughout the scene graph generically without having to
add an explicit count or flag on specific Node types. This is especially
useful to track Nodes defined through Procedurals out of Cycles' control.
This also modifies the order in which nodes are deleted to ensure that
upon deletion, a Node does not attempt to decrement the reference
count of another Node which was already freed or deleted.
This is not currently used, but will be in the next commit.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D10965
Using rna iterators in range-based for loops is possible since {rBc4286ddb095d32714c9d5f10751a14f5871b3844}.
This patch only updates the places that are easy to update
without more changes in surrounding code.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D10195
This optimizes device updates (during user edits or frame changes in
the viewport) by avoiding unnecessary computations. To achieve this,
we use a combination of the sockets' update flags as well as some new
flags passed to the various managers when tagging for an update to tell
exactly what the tagging is for (e.g. shader was modified, object was
removed, etc.).
Besides avoiding recomputations, we also avoid resending to the devices
unmodified data arrays, thus reducing bandwidth usage. For OptiX and
Embree, BVH packing was also multithreaded.
The performance improvements may vary depending on the used device (CPU
or GPU), and the content of the scene. Simple scenes (e.g. with no adaptive
subdivision or volumes) rendered using OptiX will benefit from this work
the most.
On average, for a variety of animated scenes, this gives a 3x speedup.
Reviewed By: #cycles, brecht
Maniphest Tasks: T79174
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D9555
This encapsulates Node socket members behind a set of specific methods;
as such it is no longer possible to directly access Node class members
from exporters and parts of Cycles.
The methods are defined via the NODE_SOCKET_API macros in `graph/
node.h`, and are for getting or setting a specific socket's value, as
well as querying or modifying the state of its update flag.
The setters will check whether the value has changed and tag the socket
as modified appropriately. This will let us know how a Node has changed
and what to update, which is the first concrete step toward a more
granular scene update system.
Since the setters will tag the Node sockets as modified when passed
different data, this patch also removes the various modified methods
on Nodes in favor of Node::is_modified which checks the sockets'
update flags status.
Reviewed By: brecht
Maniphest Tasks: T79174
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8544
This patch allows the user to type a property name into the
Attribute node, which will then output the value of the property
for each individual object, allowing to e.g. customize shaders
by object without duplicating the shader.
In order to make supporting this easier for Eevee, it is necessary
to explicitly choose whether the attribute is varying or uniform
via a dropdown option of the Attribute node. The dropdown also
allows choosing whether instancing should be taken into account.
The Cycles design treats all attributes as one common namespace,
so the Blender interface converts the enum to a name prefix that
can't be entered using keyboard.
In Eevee, the attributes are provided to the shader via a UBO indexed
with resource_id, similar to the existing Object Info data. Unlike it,
however, it is necessary to maintain a separate buffer for every
requested combination of attributes.
This is done using a hash table with the attribute set as the key,
as it is expected that technically different but similar materials
may use the same set of attributes. In addition, in order to minimize
wasted memory, a sparse UBO pool is implemented, so that chunks that
don't contain any data don't have to be allocated.
The back-end Cycles code is already refactored and committed by Brecht.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2057
The issue stems from the fact that scene arrays are not cleared when rendering is done. This was not really an issue before the introduction of the ownership system (rB429afe0c626a) as the id_map would recreate scene data arrays based on their new content. However, now that the id_maps do not have access to the scene data anymore the arrays are never created.
Another related issue is that the BlenderSync instance is never freed when the persistent data option is activated.
To fix this, we delete nodes created by the id_maps in their destructors, and delete the BlenderSync instance before creating a new one, so the id_maps destructors are actually called.
Reviewed By: brecht
Maniphest Tasks: T82129
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D9378
This encapsulates Node socket members behind a set of specific methods;
as such it is no longer possible to directly access Node class members
from exporters and parts of Cycles.
The methods are defined via the NODE_SOCKET_API macros in `graph/
node.h`, and are for getting or setting a specific socket's value, as
well as querying or modifying the state of its update flag.
The setters will check whether the value has changed and tag the socket
as modified appropriately. This will let us know how a Node has changed
and what to update, which is the first concrete step toward a more
granular scene update system.
Since the setters will tag the Node sockets as modified when passed
different data, this patch also removes the various `modified` methods
on Nodes in favor of `Node::is_modified` which checks the sockets'
update flags status.
Reviewed By: brecht
Maniphest Tasks: T79174
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8544
Avoid accessing mesh emitter and hair at the same time. This is not ideal for
performance, but once we have a dedicated hair object this will resolve itself.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D9322
This improves performance in scene synchronization when there are many
mesh, hair and volume objects. Sync time speedups in benchmarks:
barbershop 5.2x
bmw 1.3x
fishycat 1.5x
koro 1.0x
sponza 3.0x
victor 1.4x
wdas_cloud 0.9x
Implementation by Nicolas Lelong, and Jagannadhan Ravi (AMD).
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D9258
Problem: the Blender synchronization process creates and tags nodes for usage. It does
this by directly adding and removing nodes from the scene data. If some node is not tagged
as used at the end of a synchronization, it then deletes the node from the scene. This poses
a problem when it comes to supporting procedural nodes who can create other nodes not known
by the Blender synchonization system, which will remove them.
Nodes now have a NodeOwner, which is set after creation. Those owners for now are the Scene
for scene level nodes and ShaderGraph for shader nodes. Instead of creating and deleting
nodes using `new` and `delete` explicitely, we now use `create_node` and `delete_node` methods
found on the owners. `delete_node` will assert that the owner is the right one.
Whenever a scene level node is created or deleted, the appropriate node manager is tagged for
an update, freeing this responsability from BlenderSync or other software exporters.
Concerning BlenderSync, the `id_maps` do not explicitely manipulate scene data anymore, they
only keep track of which nodes are used, employing the scene to create and delete them. To
achieve this, the ParticleSystem is now a Node, although it does not have any sockets.
This is part of T79131.
Reviewed By: #cycles, brecht
Maniphest Tasks: T79131
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8540
This replaces the cmake options `WITH_NEW_OBJECT_TYPES` and
`WITH_NEW_SIMULATION_TYPE` with two experimental userpref settings:
* `use_new_particle_system`: Enables the point cloud type and the simulation editor.
* `use_new_hair_type`: Only displays the add-operator in the add menu for now.
Note, in the current state you can't do anything productive with the new particle
system or the new hair type. Features will be added step by step in the upcoming
weeks and months.
Reviewers: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8096
A new user parameter can be used to shift the shadow terminator
towards the light source. With it, one can hide some of the
artifacts that appear on coarse meshes with smooth shading.
Note that this technique is not engery conserving.
This is based on the work by the Appleseed renderer team.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D7634
Voxels are loaded directly from the OpenVDB grid. Rendering still only supports
dense grid, so memory usage is not great for sparse volumes, this is to be
addressed in the future.
Ref T73201
Cycles did not update the "is_enabled" flag on lights when they were synchronized again, which caused all lights disabled by "LightManager::disable_ineffective_light" to be disabled indefinitely. As a result the OptiX kernels were not reloaded with correct features when a change to a light was made. This fixes that by updating the "is_enabled" flag during synchronization.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6141
Now local collections are fully working with cycles preview, while the
collection visibility bug is fixed.
Local collections were not working with cycles viewport even before the recent
commit to allow users to show collections that are hidden in the view layer.
It just got worse with said commit (0812949bbc).
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6034
The local view check in the RNA didn't support instanced objects. Every
object has a copy of the local_view_bits from the base. This patch
changes the check to look at the local stored bits.
This patch removes the check if the object is part of the view_layer.
In the cases we are using it this check is not relevant. The `mesh_tissue`
add-on also uses it, and is not effected by this change.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D5773
This diff will add support for local view to Cycles rendered preview mode.
Currently the implementation shows same results as EEVEE does. This entails
a difference with Blender 2.79, where lights were automatically added to the
local view. {T69780} describes this should be solved before the next release.
This patch also solves missing `owner_id` issues when using the RNA CPP Api
from Cycles. Cycles didn't provide the `owner_id` making some functionality
fail, what then was worked around in Blender. It also fixes an issue in
`makesrna` where incorrect CPP code was generated when only `PARM_RNAPTR`
was provided.
An optional `view_layer` parameter is added to the `Object.local_view_get`
method to reduce lookups.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D5753
This change implements the basics as described in {T68312} for the
shading modes.
* LookDev shading mode is renamed to Material Preview. It always uses Eevee as renderer, and is intended to provide a fast material preview suitable for texture painting, and texture and material setup.
* Rendered shading gains "Use Scene Lights" and "Use Scene World" options similar to current Material Preview. These will be enabled by default. When Use Scene World is turned off, HDRIs will be used for lighting instead. These options are available for EEVEE and Cycles.
* Renderers will be able to customize the shading settings panel and add additional settings.
Reviewed By: brecht, fclem
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D5612
The object color property is added as an additional output in
the Object Info node.
Reviewers: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D5554
