This patch adds support for the curve primitive from OptiX to Cycles. It's currently hidden
behind a debug option, since there can be some slight rendering differences still (because no
backface culling is performed and something seems off with endcaps). The curve primitive
was added with the OptiX 7.1 SDK and requires a r450 driver or newer, so this also updates
the codebase to be able to build with the new SDK.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8223
This keeps render results compatible for combined CPU + GPU rendering.
Peformance and quality primitives is quite different than before. There
are now two options:
* Rounded Ribbon: render hair as flat ribbon with (fake) rounded normals, for
fast rendering. Hair curves are subdivided with a fixed number of user
specified subdivisions.
This gives relatively good results, especially when used with the Principled
Hair BSDF and hair viewed from a typical distance. There are artifacts when
viewed closed up, though this was also the case with all previous primitives
(but different ones).
* 3D Curve: render hair as 3D curve, for accurate results when viewing hair
close up. This automatically subdivides the curve until it is smooth.
This gives higher quality than any of the previous primitives, but does come
at a performance cost and is somewhat slower than our previous Thick curves.
The main problem here is performance. For CPU and OpenCL rendering performance
seems usually quite close or better for similar quality results.
However for CUDA and Optix, performance of 3D curve intersection is problematic,
with e.g. 1.45x longer render time in Koro (though there is no equivalent quality
and rounded ribbons seem fine for that scene). Any help or ideas to optimize this
are welcome.
Ref T73778
Depends on D8012
Maniphest Tasks: T73778
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8013
Triangles were very memory intensive. The only reason they were not removed yet
is that they gave more accurate results, but there will be an accurate 3D curve
primitive added for this.
Line rendering was always poor quality since the ends do not match up. To keep CPU
and GPU compatibility we just remove them entirely. They could be brought back if
an Embree compatible implementation is added, but it's not clear to me that there
is a use case for these that we'd consider important.
Ref T73778
Reviewers: #cycles
Subscribers:
The OptiX intersection program for curves uses "optixGetObjectRayDirection"
to get the ray direction in object space (which was inverse transformed
with the current transformation matrix). OptiX does no additional operations
on it, so if there is a scaling transform, the direction is not normalized.
But the curve intersection routine expects that. In addition, the distances
used in "optixGetRayTmax()" and "optixReportIntersection()" are in world
space, so need to adjust them accordingly.
