Previously it would bake viewed from above the surface. The new option can be
useful when the baked result is meant to be viewed from a fixed viewpoint or
with limited camera motion.
Some effort is made to give a continuous reflection on parts of the surface
invisible to the camera, but this is necessarily only a rough approximation.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15921
This adds path guiding features into Cycles by integrating Intel's Open Path
Guiding Library. It can be enabled in the Sampling > Path Guiding panel in the
render properties.
This feature helps reduce noise in scenes where finding a path to light is
difficult for regular path tracing.
The current implementation supports guiding directional sampling decisions on
surfaces, when the material contains a least one diffuse component, and in
volumes with isotropic and anisotropic Henyey-Greenstein phase functions.
On surfaces, the guided sampling decision is proportional to the product of
the incident radiance and the normal-oriented cosine lobe and in volumes it
is proportional to the product of the incident radiance and the phase function.
The incident radiance field of a scene is learned and updated during rendering
after each per-frame rendering iteration/progression.
At the moment, path guiding is only supported by the CPU backend. Support for
GPU backends will be added in future versions of OpenPGL.
Ref T92571
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15286
Simplifies code overall to do it inside the eval function, most of the BSDFs
already compute the dot product.
The refactoring in bsdf_principled_hair_eval() was needed to avoid a HIP
compiler bug. Cause is unclear, just changing the implementation enough
is meant to sidestep it.
Ref T92571, D15286
* Return roughness and IOR for BSDF sampling
* Add functions to query IOR and label for given BSDF
* Default IOR to 1.0 instead of 0.0 for BSDFs that don't use it
* Ensure pdf >= 0.0 in case of numerical precision issues
Ref T92571, D15286
Cleans up the file structure to be more similar to that of the SVM
and also makes it possible to build kernels with OSL support, but
without having to include SVM support.
This patch was split from D15902.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15949
The multi-dimensional Sobol pattern required us to carefully use as low
dimensions as possible, as quality goes down in higher dimensions. Now that we
have two sampling patterns that are at least as good, there is no need to keep
it around and the implementation can be simplified.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15788
Fix two issues in the previous implementation:
* Only power-of-two prefixes were progressively stratified, not suffixes.
This resulted in unnecessarily increased noise when using non-power-of-two
sample counts.
* In order to try to get away with just a single sample pattern, the code
used a combination of sample index shuffling and Cranley-Patterson rotation.
Index shuffling is normally fine, but due to the sample patterns themselves
not being quite right (as described above) this actually resulted in
additional increased noise. Cranley-Patterson, on the other hand, always
increases noise with randomized (t,s) nets like PMJ02, and should be avoided
with these kinds of sequences.
Addressed with the following changes:
* Replace the sample pattern generation code with a much simpler algorithm
recently published in the paper "Stochastic Generation of (t, s) Sample
Sequences". This new implementation is easier to verify, produces fully
progressively stratified PMJ02, and is *far* faster than the previous code,
being O(N) in the number of samples generated.
* It keeps the sample index shuffling, which works correctly now due to the
improved sample patterns. But it now uses a newer high-quality hash instead
of the original Laine-Karras hash.
* The scrambling distance feature cannot (to my knowledge) be implemented with
any decorrelation strategy other than Cranley-Patterson, so Cranley-Patterson
is still used when that feature is enabled. But it is now disabled otherwise,
since it increases noise.
* In place of Cranley-Patterson, multiple independent patterns are generated
and randomly chosen for different pixels and dimensions as described in the
original PMJ paper. In this patch, the pattern selection is done via
hash-based shuffling to ensure there are no repeats within a single pixel
until all patterns have been used.
The combination of these fixes brings the quality of Cycles' PMJ sampler in
line with the previously submitted Sobol-Burley sampler in D15679. They are
essentially indistinguishable in terms of quality/noise, which is expected
since they are both randomized (0,2) sequences.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15746
Based on the paper "Practical Hash-based Owen Scrambling" by Brent Burley,
2020, Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques.
It is distinct from the existing Sobol sampler in two important ways:
* It is Owen scrambled, which gives it a much better convergence rate in many
situations.
* It uses padding for higher dimensions, rather than using higher Sobol
dimensions directly. In practice this is advantagous because high-dimensional
Sobol sequences have holes in their sampling patterns that don't resolve
until an unreasonable number of samples are taken. (See Burley's paper for
details.)
The pattern reduces noise in some benchmark scenes, however it is also slower,
particularly on the CPU. So for now Progressive Multi-Jittered sampling remains
the default.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15679
* Store compact ray differentials in ShaderData and compute full differentials
on demand. This reduces register pressure on the GPU.
* Remove BSDF differential code that was effectively doing nothing as the
differential orientation was discarded when making it compact.
This gives a 1-5% speedup with RTX A6000 + OptiX in our benchmarks, with the
bigger speedups in simpler scenes.
Renders appear to be identical except for the Both displacement option that
does both displacement and bump.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15677
Detect cases where a ray-intersection would miss the current triangle, which if
the intersection is strictly watertight, implies that a neighboring triangle would
incorrectly be hit instead.
When that is detected, apply a ray-offset. The idea being that we only want to
introduce potential error from ray offsets if we really need to.
This work for BVH2 and Embree, as we are able to match the ray-interesction
bit-for-bit, though doing so for Embree requires ugly hacks. Tiny differences
like fused-multiply-add or dot product intrinstics in matrix inversion and ray
intersection needed to be matched exactly, so this is fragile.
Unfortunately we're not able to do the same for OptiX or MetalRT, since those
implementations are unknown (and possibly impossible to match as hardware
instructions). Still artifacts are much reduced, though not eliminated.
Ref T97259
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15559
These replace float3 and packed_float3 in various places in the kernel where a
spectral color representation will be used in the future. That representation
will require more than 3 channels and conversion to from/RGB. The kernel code
was refactored to remove the assumption that Spectrum and RGB colors are the
same thing.
There are no functional changes, Spectrum is still a float3 and the conversion
functions are no-ops.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15535
Assume that all faces using the smae material form a closed mesh, so that
joining meshes gives the same result as separate meshes.
It does mean that using different materials on different sides of one
closed mesh do not work, but the meaning of that is poorly defined anyway
if there is a volume interior.
Simplifies intersection code a little and slightly improves precision regarding
self intersection.
The parametric texture coordinate in shader nodes is still the same as before
for compatibility.
This was tested in some places to check if code was being compiled for the
CPU, however this is only defined in the kernel. Checking __KERNEL_GPU__
always works.
Having the OptiX/MetalRT/Embree/MetalRT implementations all in one file with
many #ifdefs became too confusing. Instead split it up per device, and also
move it together with device specific hit/filter/intersect functions and
associated data types.
For transparency, volume and light intersection rays, adjust these distances
rather than the ray start position. This way we increment the start distance
by the smallest possible float increment to avoid self intersections, and be
sure it works as the distance compared to be will be exactly the same as
before, due to the ray start position and direction remaining the same.
Fix T98764, T96537, hair ray tracing precision issues.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15455
This was added for Metal, but also gives good results with CUDA and OptiX.
Also enable it for future Apple GPUs instead of only M1 and M2, since this has
been shown to help across multiple GPUs so the better bet seems to enable
rather than disable it.
Also moves some of the logic outside of the Metal device code, and always
enables the code in the kernel since other devices don't do dynamic compile.
Time per sample with OptiX + RTX A6000:
new old
barbershop_interior 0.0730s 0.0727s
bmw27 0.0047s 0.0053s
classroom 0.0428s 0.0464s
fishy_cat 0.0102s 0.0108s
junkshop 0.0366s 0.0395s
koro 0.0567s 0.0578s
monster 0.0206s 0.0223s
pabellon 0.0158s 0.0174s
sponza 0.0088s 0.0100s
spring 0.1267s 0.1280s
victor 0.0524s 0.0531s
wdas_cloud 0.0817s 0.0816s
Ref D15331, T87836
When the solve is successful, the light sample needs to be updated since the
effective shading point is now on the last refractive interface. Spread was
not taken into account, creating false caustics.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15449
This patch partitions the active indices into chunks prior to sorting by material in order to tradeoff some material coherence for better locality. On Apple Silicon GPUs (particularly higher end M1-family GPUs), we observe overall render time speedups of up to 15%. The partitioning is implemented by repeating the range of `shader_sort_key` for each partition, and encoding a "locator" key which distributes the indices into sorted chunks.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15331
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
* Rename "texture" to "data array". This has not used textures for a long time,
there are just global memory arrays now. (On old CUDA GPUs there was a cache
for textures but not global memory, so we used to put all data in textures.)
* For CUDA and HIP, put globals in KernelParams struct like other devices.
* Drop __ prefix for data array names, no possibility for naming conflict now that
these are in a struct.
Move MNEE to own kernel, separate from shader ray-tracing. This does introduce
the limitation that a shader can't use both MNEE and AO/bevel, but that seems
like the better trade-off for now.
We can experiment with bigger kernel organization changes later.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15070
Found those missing casts while looking into a crash report made in
the Blender Chat. Was unable to reproduce the crash, but the casts
should totally be there to avoid integer overflow.
Ensure the correct total/diffuse/transmission depth is set when evaluating
shaders for MNEE, consistent with regular light shader evaluation.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D14902
Made tangent frame consistent across the surface regardless of the sample,
which was not the case with the previous algorithm. Previously, a tangent
frame would stay consistent for the same sample throughout the walk, but not
from sample to sample for the same triangle. This actually resulted in code
simplification.
Also includes additional fixes:
* Fixed an important bug that manifested itself with multiple lights in the
scene, where caustics had abnormally low amplitude: The final light pdf did
not include the light distribution pdf.
* Removed unnecessary orthonormal basis generation function, using cycles'
native one instead.
* Increased solver max iteration back to 64: It turns out we sometimes need
these extra iterations in cases where projection back to the surface takes
many steps. The effective solver iteration count, the most expensive part,
is actually much less than the raw iteration count.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D14931
It was wrongly writing passes twice, for both the surface entry and exit points.
We can skip code for filtering closures, emission and holdout also, as these do
nothing with only a subsurface diffuse closure present.
- Add missing doxy-section for Apply Parent Inverse Operator
- Use identity for None comparison in Python.
- Remove newline from operator doc-strings.
- Use '*' prefix multi-line C comment blocks.
- Separate filenames from doc-strings.
- Remove break after return.
Remove need for shadow caustic caster geometry to have a UV layout. UVs were
useful to maintain a consistent tangent frame across the surface while
performing the walk. A consistent tangent frame is necessary for rough
surfaces where a normal offset encodes the sampled h, which should point
towards the same direction across the mesh.
In order to get a continuous surface parametrization without UVs, the
technique described in this paper was implemented:
"The Natural-Constraint Representation of the Path Space for Efficient
Light Transport Simulation" (Supplementary Material), SIGGRAPH 2014.
In addition to implementing this feature:
* Shadow caustic casters without smooth normals are now ignored (triggered
some refactoring and cleaning).
* Hit point calculation was refactored using existing utils functions,
simplifying the code.
* The max number of solver iterations was reduced to 32, a solution is
usually found by then.
* Added generalized geometry term clamping (transfer matrix calculation can
sometimes get unstable).
* Add stop condition to Newton solver for more consistent CPU and GPU result.
* Add support for multi scatter GGX refraction.
Fixes T96990, T96991
Ref T94120
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D14623
