While Cycles already supports using both CPU and GPU at the same time, there
currently is a large problem with it: Since the CPU grabs one tile per thread,
at the end of the render the GPU runs out of new work but the CPU still needs
quite some time to finish its current times.
Having smaller tiles helps somewhat, but especially OpenCL rendering tends to
lose performance with smaller tiles.
Therefore, this commit adds support for tile stealing: When a GPU device runs
out of new tiles, it can signal the CPU to release one of its tiles.
This way, at the end of the render, the GPU quickly finishes the remaining
tiles instead of having to wait for the CPU.
Thanks to AMD for sponsoring this work!
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D9324
Compared to Optix denoise, this is usually slower since there is no GPU
acceleration. Some optimizations may still be possible, in avoid copies
to the GPU and/or denoising less often.
The main thing is that this adds viewport denoising support for computers
without an NVIDIA GPU (as long as the CPU supports SSE 4.1, which is nearly
all of them).
Ref T76259
Enabling render and viewport denoising is now both done from the render
properties. View layers still can individually be enabled/disabled for
denoising and have their own denoising parameters.
Note that the denoising engine also affects how denoising data passes are
output even if no denoising happens on the render itself, to make the passes
compatible with the engine.
This includes internal refactoring for how denoising parameters are passed
along, trying to avoid code duplication and unclear naming.
Ref T76259
This feature takes some inspiration from
"RenderMan: An Advanced Path Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering" and
"A Hierarchical Automatic Stopping Condition for Monte Carlo Global Illumination"
The basic principle is as follows:
While samples are being added to a pixel, the adaptive sampler writes half
of the samples to a separate buffer. This gives it two separate estimates
of the same pixel, and by comparing their difference it estimates convergence.
Once convergence drops below a given threshold, the pixel is considered done.
When a pixel has not converged yet and needs more samples than the minimum,
its immediate neighbors are also set to take more samples. This is done in order
to more reliably detect sharp features such as caustics. A 3x3 box filter that
is run periodically over the tile buffer is used for that purpose.
After a tile has finished rendering, the values of all passes are scaled as if
they were rendered with the full number of samples. This way, any code operating
on these buffers, for example the denoiser, does not need to be changed for
per-pixel sample counts.
Reviewed By: brecht, #cycles
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D4686
This fixes denoising being delayed until after all rendering has finished. Instead, tile-based
denoising is now part of the "RENDER" task again, so that it is all in one task and does not
cause issues with dedicated task pools where tasks are serialized.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6940
The OptiX denoiser can be a great help when rendering in the viewport, since it is really fast
and needs few samples to produce convincing results. This patch therefore adds support for
using any Cycles denoiser in the viewport also (but only the OptiX one is selectable because
the NLM one is too slow to be usable currently). It also adds support for denoising on a
different device than rendering (so one can e.g. render with the CPU but denoise with OptiX).
Reviewed By: #cycles, brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6554
This patch adds support for the OptiX denoiser as an alternative to the existing NLM denoiser in Cycles. It's re-using the same denoising architecture based on tiles and therefore implicitly also works with multiple GPUs.
Reviewed By: sergey
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D6395
This adds a cycles.denoise_animation operator, which denoises an animation
sequence or individual file. Renders must be saved as multilayer EXR files
with denoising data passes.
By default file path and frame range come from the current scene, and EXR
files are denoised in-place. Alternatively, a different input and/or output
file path can be provided.
Denoising settings come from the current view layer. Renders can be denoised
again with different settings, as the original noisy image is preserved along
with other passes and metadata.
There is no user interface yet for this feature, that comes later.
Code by Lukas with modifications by Brecht. This feature was originally
developed for Tangent Animation, thanks for the support!
This is the internal implementation, not available from the API or
interface yet. The algorithm takes into account past and future frames,
both to get more coherent animation and reduce noise.
Ref D3889.
Prefiltering of feature passes will happen during rendering, which can
then be used for denoising immediately or written as a render pass for
later (animation) denoising.
The number of denoising data passes written is reduced because of this,
leaving out the feature variance passes. The passes are now Normal,
Albedo, Depth, Shadowing, Variance and Intensity.
Ref D3889.
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!
The idea is to make include statements more explicit and obvious where the
file is coming from, additionally reducing chance of wrong header being
picked up.
For example, it was not obvious whether bvh.h was refferring to builder
or traversal, whenter node.h is a generic graph node or a shader node
and cases like that.
Surely this might look obvious for the active developers, but after some
time of not touching the code it becomes less obvious where file is coming
from.
This was briefly mentioned in T50824 and seems @brecht is fine with such
explicitness, but need to agree with all active developers before committing
this.
Please note that this patch is lacking changes related on GPU/OpenCL
support. This will be solved if/when we all agree this is a good idea to move
forward.
Reviewers: brecht, lukasstockner97, maiself, nirved, dingto, juicyfruit, swerner
Reviewed By: lukasstockner97, maiself, nirved, dingto
Subscribers: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2586
The Progress system in Cycles had two limitations so far:
- It just counted tiles, but ignored their size. For example, when rendering a 600x500 image with 512x512 tiles, the right 88x500 tile would count for 50% of the progress, although it only covers 15% of the image.
- Scene update time was incorrectly counted as rendering time - therefore, the remaining time started very long and gradually decreased.
This patch fixes both problems:
First of all, the Progress now has a function to ignore time spans, and that is used to ignore scene update time.
The larger change is the tile size: Instead of counting samples per tile, so that the final value is num_samples*num_tiles, the code now counts every sample for every pixel, so that the final value is num_samples*num_pixels.
Along with that, some unused variables were removed from the Progress and Session classes.
Reviewers: brecht, sergey, #cycles
Subscribers: brecht, candreacchio, sergey
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2214
The combined pass is built with the contributions the user finds fit.
It is useful for lightmap baking, as well as non-view dependent effects
baking.
The manual will be updated once we get closer to the 2.77 release.
Meanwhile the new page can be found here:
http://dalaifelinto.com/blender-manual/render/cycles/baking.html
Reviewers: sergey, brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D1674
This makes it possible to move some parts of evaluation from host to the device
and hopefully reduce memory usage by avoid having full RGBA buffer on the host.
Reviewers: juicyfruit, lukasstockner97, brecht
Reviewed By: lukasstockner97, brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D1702
This is currently unused but crucial for things like calculating amount of
device memory required to deal with the tasks.
Maybe not really best place to store it, but consider it good enough for now.
Baking progress preview is not possible, in parts due to the way the API
was designed. But at least you get to see the progress bar while baking.
Reviewers: sergey
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D656
except for curves, that's still missing from the OpenColorIO GLSL shader.
The pixels are stored in a half float texture, converterd from full float with
native GPU instructions and SIMD on the CPU, so it should be pretty quick.
Using a GLSL shader is useful for GPU render because it avoids a copy through
CPU memory.
* Non-Progressive integrator is now available on the GPU (CUDA, sm_20 and above).
Implementation details:
* kernel_path_trace() has been split up into two functions:
kernel_path_trace_non_progressive() and kernel_path_trace_progressive().
* We compile two CUDA kernel entry functions (in kernel.cu) for the two integrators, they are still inside one .cubin file but due to the kernel separation there should be no performance problem. I tested with the BMW file on my Geforce 540M and the render times were the same for 100 samples (1.57 min in my case).
This is part of my GSoC project, SVN merge of r59032 + manual merge of UI changes for this from my branch.
Just makes progressive refine :)
This means the whole image would be refined gradually using as much
threads as it's set in performance settings. Having enough tiles is
required to have this option working as it's expected.
Technically it's implemented by repeatedly computing next sample for
all the tiles before switching to next sample.
This works around 7-12% slower than regular tile-based rendering, so
use this option only if you really need it.
This commit also fixes progressive update of image when Save Buffers
option is enabled.
And one more thing this commit fixes is handling display buffer with
Save Buffers option enabled. If this option is enabled image buffer
wouldn't have neither byte nor float buffer until image is fully
rendered which could backfire in missing image while rendering in
cases color management cache became full.
This issue solved by allocating byte buffer for image buffer from
tile update callback.
Patch was reviewed by Brecht. He also made some minor edits to
original version to patch. Thanks, man!
Regular rendering now works tiled, and supports save buffers to save memory
during render and cache render results.
Brick texture node by Thomas.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/Textures#Brick_Texture
Image texture Blended Box Mapping.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/Textures#Image_Texturehttp://mango.blender.org/production/blended_box/
Various bug fixes by Sergey and Campbell.
* Fix for reading freed memory in some node setups.
* Fix incorrect memory read when synchronizing mesh motion.
* Fix crash appearing when direct light usage is different on different layers.
* Fix for vector pass gives wrong result in some circumstances.
* Fix for wrong resolution used for rendering Render Layer node.
* Option to cancel rendering when doing initial synchronization.
* No more texture limit when using CPU render.
* Many fixes for new tiled rendering.
