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.
This patch adds support for light portals: objects that help sampling the
environment light, therefore improving convergence. Using them tor other
lights in a unidirectional pathtracer is virtually useless.
The sampling is done with the area-preserving code already used for area lamps.
MIS is used both for combination of different portals and for combining portal-
and envmap-sampling.
The direction of portals is considered, they aren't used if the sampling point
is behind them.
Reviewers: sergey, dingto, #cycles
Reviewed By: dingto, #cycles
Subscribers: Lapineige, nutel, jtheninja, dsisco11, januz, vitorbalbio, candreacchio, TARDISMaker, lichtwerk, ace_dragon, marcog, mib2berlin, Tunge, lopataasdf, lordodin, sergey, dingto
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D1133
Seems it's just another issue with the compiler, worked around by explicitly
telling not to inline some function.
In theory we can unify this with CPU, but we're quite close to the release
so better be safe than sorry.
Root of the issue goes back to the on-fly normals commit and the
latest fix for it wasn't actually correct. I've mixed two fixes
in there.
So the idea here goes back to storing negative scaled object flag
and flip runtime-calculated normal if this flag is set, which is
pretty much the same as the original fix for the issue from me.
The issue with motion blur wasn't caused by the rumtime normals
patch and it had issues before, because it already did runtime
normals calculation. Now made it so motion triangles takes the
negative scale flag into account.
This actually makes code more clean imo and avoids rather confusing
flipping code in mesh.cpp.
* Volume multiple importace sampling support to combine equiangular and distance
sampling, for both homogeneous and heterogeneous volumes.
* Branched path "Sample All Direct Lights" and "Sample All Indirect Lights" now
apply to volumes as well as surfaces.
Implementation note:
For simplicity this is all done with decoupled ray marching, the only case we do
not use decoupled is for distance only sampling with one light sample. The
homogeneous case should still compile on the GPU because it only requires fixed
size storage, but the heterogeneous case will be trickier to get working.
Probably will not be noticed in most scenes. This helps reduce noise when you
have multiple lamps with MIS enabled, at the cost of some performance, but from
testing some scenes this seems better.
