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
Compute a subset of the area light that actually affects the shading point
and only samples points within that.
It's not perfect as the real subset is a circle instead of a rectangle, and
the attenuation is not accounted for. However it massively reduces noise for
shading points near the area light anyway.
Ellipse shaped area lights do not have this importance sampling, but do not
have solid angle importance sampling either.
Ref D10594
This simulates the effect of a honeycomb or grid placed in front of a softbox.
In practice, it works by attenuating rays coming off-angle as a function of the
provided spread angle parameter.
Setting the parameter to 180 degrees poses no restrictions to the rays, making
the light behave the same way as before this patch.
The total light power is normalized based on the spread angle, so that the
light strength remains the same.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D10594
The kernel did not work correctly when these were disabled anyway. The
optimized BVH traversal for the no instances case was also only used on
the CPU, so no longer makes sense to keep.
Ref T73778
Depends on D8010
Maniphest Tasks: T73778
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8011
This commit adds a new model to the Sky Texture node, which is based on a
method by Nishita et al. and works by basically simulating volumetric
scattering in the atmosphere.
By making some approximations (such as only considering single scattering),
we get a fairly simple and fast simulation code that takes into account
Rayleigh and Mie scattering as well as Ozone absorption.
This code is used to precompute a 512x128 texture which is then looked up
during render time, and is fast enough to allow real-time tweaking in the
viewport.
Due to the nature of the simulation, it exposes several parameters that
allow for lots of flexibility in choosing the look and matching real-world
conditions (such as Air/Dust/Ozone density and altitude).
Additionally, the same volumetric approach can be used to compute absorption
of the direct sunlight, so the model also supports adding direct sunlight.
This makes it significantly easier to set up Sun+Sky illumination where
the direction, intensity and color of the sun actually matches the sky.
In order to support properly sampling the direct sun component, the commit
also adds logic for sampling a specific area to the kernel light sampling
code. This is combined with portal and background map sampling using MIS.
This sampling logic works for the common case of having one Sky texture
going into the Background shader, but if a custom input to the Vector
node is used or if there are multiple Sky textures, it falls back to using
only background map sampling (while automatically setting the resolution to
4096x2048 if auto resolution is used).
More infos and preview can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gQta0ygFWXTrl5Pmvl_nZRgUw0mWg0FJeRuNKS36m08/view
Underlying model, implementation and documentation by Marco (@nacioss).
Improvements, cleanup and sun sampling by @lukasstockner.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D7896
Use a single loop to iterate over all lights, reducing divergence and amount
of code to generate. Moving ray intersection calls out of conditionals will
also help the Optix compiler.
Ref D5363
Just basic algebra - because all vectors have the same z coordinate, a lot of terms end up cancelling out.
Not exactly a massive improvement, but it's measurable with Branched PT and a high sample count on the lamp.
Reviewers: brecht, sergey
Reviewed By: brecht
Subscribers: swerner
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3540
The automatic mode checks all Enviroment Texture nodes and picks the largest image's resolution.
If there are no Enviroment Textures, it just uses the old default.
Also, the sampling map now isn't limited to square shapes. The automatic detection uses the exact image size,
the manual UI option now halves the value to get the height.
A default aspect ratio of 2:1 makes sense since this is what most HDRIs use.
Reviewers: brecht, sergey
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3477
This patch adds support for IES files, a file format that is commonly used to store the directional intensity distribution of light sources.
The new IES node is supposed to be plugged into the Strength input of the Emission node of the lamp.
Since people generating IES files do not really seem to care about the standard, the parser is flexible enough to accept all test files I have tried.
Some common weirdnesses are distributing values over multiple lines that should go into one line, using commas instead of spaces as delimiters and adding various useless stuff at the end of the file.
The user interface of the node is similar to the script node, the user can either select an internal Text or load a file.
Internally, IES files are handled similar to Image textures: They are stored in slots by the LightManager and each unique IES is assigned to one slot.
The local coordinate system of the lamp is used, so that the direction of the light can be changed. For UI reasons, it's usually best to add an area light,
rotate it and then change its type, since especially the point light does not immediately show its local coordinate system in the viewport.
Reviewers: #cycles, dingto, sergey, brecht
Reviewed By: #cycles, dingto, brecht
Subscribers: OgDEV, crazyrobinhood, secundar, cardboard, pisuke, intrah, swerner, micah_denn, harvester, gottfried, disnel, campbellbarton, duarteframos, Lapineige, brecht, juicyfruit, dingto, marek, rickyblender, bliblubli, lockal, sergey
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D1543
The implementation is pretty straightforward.
In Cycles, sampling the shapes is currently done w.r.t. area instead of solid angle.
There is a paper on solid angle sampling for disks [1], but the described algorithm is based on
simply sampling the enclosing square and rejecting samples outside of the disk, which is not exactly
great for Cycles' RNG (we'd need to setup a LCG for the repeated sampling) and for GPU divergence.
Even worse, the algorithm is only defined for disks. For ellipses, the basic idea still works, but a
way to analytically calculate the solid angle is required. This is technically possible [2], but the
calculation is extremely complex and still requires a lookup table for the Heuman Lambda function.
Therefore, I've decided to not implement that for now, we could still look into it later on.
In Eevee, the code uses the existing ltc_evaluate_disk to implement the lighting calculations.
[1]: "Solid Angle Sampling of Disk and Cylinder Lights"
[2]: "Analytical solution for the solid angle subtended at any point by an ellipse via a point source radiation vector potential"
Reviewers: sergey, brecht, fclem
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3171
This causes some difference in the classroom scene, where ray visibility
tricks are used and break the MIS balance. Otherwise there doesn't seem
to be much effect, but better to use the right formulas. Problem originally
identified by Lukas.
Previously we used a 1D sequence to select a light, and another 2D sequence
to sample a point on the light. For multiple lights this meant each light
would get a random subset of a 2D stratified sequence, which is not
guaranteed to be stratified anymore.
Now we use only a 2D sequence, split into segments along the X axis, one for
each light. The samples that fall within a segment then each are a stratified
sequence, at least in the limit. So for example for two lights, we split up
the unit square into two segments [0,0.5[ x [0,1[ and [0.5,1[ x [0,1[.
This doesn't make much difference in most scenes, mainly helps if you have a
few large area lights or some types of HDR backgrounds.
This implements Arvo's "Stratified sampling of spherical triangles". Similar to how we sample rectangular area lights, this is sampling triangles over their solid angle. It does significantly improve sampling close to the triangle, but doesn't do much for more distant triangles. So I added a simple heuristic to switch between the two methods. Unfortunately, I expect this to add render time in any case, even when it does not make any difference whatsoever. It'll take some benchmarking with various scenes and hardware to estimate how severe the impact is and if it is worth the change.
Reviewers: #cycles, brecht
Reviewed By: #cycles, brecht
Subscribers: Vega-core, brecht, SteffenD
Tags: #cycles
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2730
This commit contains the first part of the new Cycles denoising option,
which filters the resulting image using information gathered during rendering
to get rid of noise while preserving visual features as well as possible.
To use the option, enable it in the render layer options. The default settings
fit a wide range of scenes, but the user can tweak individual settings to
control the tradeoff between a noise-free image, image details, and calculation
time.
Note that the denoiser may still change in the future and that some features
are not implemented yet. The most important missing feature is animation
denoising, which uses information from multiple frames at once to produce a
flicker-free and smoother result. These features will be added in the future.
Finally, thanks to all the people who supported this project:
- Google (through the GSoC) and Theory Studios for sponsoring the development
- The authors of the papers I used for implementing the denoiser (more details
on them will be included in the technical docs)
- The other Cycles devs for feedback on the code, especially Sergey for
mentoring the GSoC project and Brecht for the code review!
- And of course the users who helped with testing, reported bugs and things
that could and/or should work better!
When using the Normal output of the Texture Coordinate node on Point and Spot lamps, the coordinates now depend on the rotation of the lamp.
On Area lamps, the Parametric output of the Geometry node now returns UV coordinates on the area lamp.
Credit for the Area lamp part goes to Stefan Werner (from D1995).
Both spot and area light have large areas where they're not visible.
Therefore, this patch stops the light sampling code when one of these cases (outside of the spotlight cone or behind the area light) occurs, before the lamp shader is evaluated.
In the case of the area light, the solid angle sampling can also be skipped.
In a test scene with Sample All Lights and 18 Area lamps and 9 Spot lamps that all point away from the area that the camera sees, render time drops from 12sec to 5sec.
Reviewers: brecht, sergey, dingto, juicyfruit
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2216
Using ones complement for detecting if transform has been applied was confusing
and led to several bugs. With this proper checks are made.
Also added a few transforms where they were missing, mostly affecting baking
and displacement when `P` is used in the shader (previously `P` was in the
wrong space for these shaders)
Also removed `TIME_INVALID` as this may have resulted in incorrect
transforms in some cases.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2192
All the changes are mainly giving explicit tips on inlining functions,
so they match how inlining worked with previous toolkit.
This make kernel compiled by CUDA 8 render in average with same speed
as previous kernels. Some scenes are somewhat faster, some of them are
somewhat slower. But slowdown is within 1% so far.
On a positive side it allows us to enable newer generation cards on
buildbots (so GTX 10x0 will be officially supported soon).
The original quad intersection test works by just testing against the two triangles that define the quad.
However, in this case it's actually faster to use the same test that's also used for portals: Determining
the distance to the plane in which the quad lies, calculating the hitpoint and checking whether it's in the
quad by projecting onto the sides.
Reviewers: brecht, sergey, dingto
Reviewed By: dingto
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2045
When using multiple portals, scene areas behind one of the portals were rendered darker than they should.
The reason for that is a pretty stupid mistake: Since portals are only used at positions that aren't behind them,
only portals that are used should be accounted for in the PDF calculation. That was actually the case, but the final
divide incorrectly divided by the total amount of portals, not the amount of visible ones.
Another issue with areas behind portals was the PDF evaluation function.
The new evaluation code is shorter, simpler and fixes this issue.
Also, the threshold for the distance check was increased to avoid artifacts where portals touch a surface.
The goal is to make Experimental kernel closer in performance to the
official kernel, avoiding spills and such.
There should not be big impact on official kernel, own tests showed
few percent performance drop on laptop's GPU. CPU was always the
same speed on AVX, AVX2 and SSE4.1 CPUs i've been testing here.
This seems to be the last essential step before we can get rid of
Experimental kernel and enable SSS officially on GPU without causing
some major performance issues.
Surely some more tweaks are possibly required, but that we can do
for until cows go home anyway.
Recent changes to kernel broke compilation of the kernels again, need some
other kind of solution for this issue.
Don't have much time for this currently, but will be addressed before the
release.
Meanwhile it's better to have some buildbot builds instead of totally failing
one.
Turning on importance sampling on area lights increases noise on diffuse
surfaces. This was caused by PDF calculated for an intersected point on
light instead of original light position.
Patch by Stefan with some own modifications.
