Bah... fix for envmaps just before 2.48 release gave good looking envmaps
only when there was no sky involved...
The alpha in environment maps should be reset to 255... something that was
never done before, but also didn't show errors until other fixes in image
rendering were done.
Previously when using light cache, there could be artifacts caused when
voxel points that were sampled outside the volume object's geometry got
interpolated into the rest of the volume. This commit adds a (similar
to a dilate) filter pass after creating the light cache, that fills
these empty areas with the average of their surrounding voxels.
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/vol_lightcache_filter.jpg
that was preventing light cache from working on some
people's systems (but went just fine on both my windows pc
and mac). I have no idea how the original code even worked
at all, it really shouldn't have.
But fixed now anyway! Thanks a bunch to Zanqdo for patience
in helping me pinpoint this.
This fixes an issue which darkened the render from inside a
volume with sky or premul on. Still need to find a good way to
get an alpha value back into the shader (for compositing etc)
without getting the render distorted by premul.
Replaced 'Sharp' falloff with 'Soft'. This falloff type has
a variable softness, and can get some quite smooth results.
It can be useful to get smooth transitions in density when
you're using particles on a large scale:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/pd_falloff_soft.jpg
Also removed 'angular velocity' turbulence source - it
wasn't doing anything useful atm
This was a bit complicated to do, but is working pretty well now, and can make shading significantly faster to render.
This option pre-calculates self-shading information into a
3d voxel grid before rendering, then uses and interpolates
that data during the main rendering phase, rather than
calculating shading for each sample. It's an approximation
and isn't as accurate as getting the lighting directly,
but in many cases it looks very similar and renders much faster.
The voxel grid covers the object's 3D screen-aligned bounding box
so this may not be that useful for large volume regions like a
big range of cloud cover, since you'll need a lot of resolution.
The render time speaks for itself here:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/vol_light_cache_interpolation.jpg
The resolution is set in the volume panel - it's the resolution
of one edge of the voxel grid. Keep in mind that the higher the
resolution, the more memory needed, like in fluid sim. The
memory requirements increase with the cube of the edge
resolution so be careful. I might try and add a little memory
calculator thing like fluid sim has there later.
The voxels are interpolated using trilinear interpolation -
here's a comparison image I made during testing:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/vol_light_cache_compare.jpg
There might still be a couple of little tweaks I can do to
improve the visual quality, I'll see.
Particle system crashed in convertblender, missing NULL check.
This fixes crash, render survives, but I doubt it was meant so...
Will leave it Janne to evaluate later.
regression files, it showed small dark outline errors on envmap.
This commit rewinds bugfix #8437, which actually had to be fixed on
another location in code, which was done a few weeks ago. :)
Index OB pass didn't support FSA for Ztransp.
Also made buttons to set black/white for non-RGBA images hide in Image Window,
the Curves color code only supports 4 channels atm.
This is on by default, and trades random noise for banding. It jitters
the step size from 75% to 125% of its original amount, and since it
uses the threaded random seeds, shouldn't flicker during animation.
These two images took roughly the same time to render:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/vol_stepsize_randomized.jpg
- modified point density so that it returns a more consistent
density with regards to search radius. Previously larger radii
would give much higher density but this is equalised out now.
- Added a new volume material option 'density scale'. This is an
overall scale multiplier for density, allowing you to (for
example) crank down the density to a more desirable range if
you're working at a large physical scale. Volume rendering is
fundamentally scale dependant so this lets you correct to get the
right visual result.
- Also tweaked a few constants, old files won't render exactly
the same, just minor things though.
proper results, should bake as if SSS was disabled.
- Fix for GLSL to handle failing shadow buffer creation better.
- Fix for sky/atmosphere version patch, was not doing files from 2.46
and newer.
due to jittering of the start position for antialiasing in a pixel.
Now it distributes the start position over the fixed osa sample
positions, instead of of random positions in space. The ugly bit is
that a custom ordering was defined for osa 8/11/16 to ensure that the
first 4 are distributed relatively fair for adaptive sampling to decide
if more samples need to be taken.
This addition allows you to perturb the point density with noise, to give
the impression of more resolution. It's a quick way to add detail, without
having to use large, complex, and slower to render particle systems.
Rather than just overlaying noise, like you might do by adding a secondary
clouds texture, it uses noise to perturb the actual coordinate looked up
in the density evaluation. This gives a much better looking result, as it
actually alters the original density.
Comparison of the particle cloud render without, and with added turbulence
(the render with turbulence only renders slightly more slowly):
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/pd_turbulence.jpg
Using the same constant noise function/spatial coordinates will give a
static appearance. This is fine (and quicker) if the particles aren't
moving, but on animated particle systems, it looks bad, as if the
particles are moving through a static noise field. To overcome this, there
are additional options for particle systems, to influence the turbulence
with the particles' average velocity, or average angular velocity. This
information is only available for particle systems at the present.
Here you can see the (dramatic) difference between no turbulence, static
turbulence, and turbulence influenced by particle velocity:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/turbu_compare.mov
- the number of segments was always 1 too many on cyclic curves.
- [#17739] - normals were not being calculated when rendering curves.
Replaced macro DL_SURFINDEX with a function. it that assumes variable names and could break from the loop that called it.
Otherwise known as a phase function, this determines in which directions
the light is scattered in the volume. Until now it's been isotropic
scattering, meaning that the light gets scattered equally in all
directions. This adds some new types for anisotropic scattering, to
scatter light more forwards or backwards towards the viewing direction,
which can be more similar to how light is scattered by particles in nature.
Here's a diagram of how light is scattered isotropically and anisotropically:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/phase_diagram.png
The new additions are:
- Rayleigh
describes scattering by very small particles in the atmosphere.
- Mie Hazy / Mie Murky
more generalised, describes scattering from large particle sizes.
- Henyey-Greenstein
a very flexible formula, that can be used to simulate a wide range of
scattering. It uses an additional 'Asymmetry' slider, ranging from -1.0
(backward scattering) to 1.0 (forward scattering) to control the
direction of scattering.
- Schlick
an approximation of Henyey-Greenstein, working similarly but faster.
And a description of how they look visually (just an omnidirectional lamp
inside a volume box)
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/phasefunctions.jpg
* Sun/sky integration
Volumes now correctly render in front of the new physical sky. Atmosphere
still doesn't work correctly with volumes, due to something that i hope
can be fixed in the atmosphere rendering, but the sky looks quite good.
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/sky_clouds.png
This also works very nicely with the anisotropic scattering, giving
clouds their signature bright halos when the sun is behind them:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/phase_cloud.mov
in comparison here's a render with isotropic scattering:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/phase_cloud_isotropic.png
* Added back the max volume depth tracing limit, as a hard coded value -
fixes crashes with weird geometry, like the overlapping faces around
suzanne's eyes. As a general note, it's always best to use volume
materials on airtight geometry, without intersecting or overlapping faces.
the emission component by the density at the current point, which
made the volume too bright in less dense areas. This made it look
too rough, as opposed to smooth as it should be. This makes the
particle rendering look *much* better, thanks a bunch to ZanQdo for
complaining and kicking my butt to make me realise the error.
Here's an example of how smooth it looks now:
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/smoke_test03.movhttp://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/smoke_test03.blend
Settings in existing files will have to be tweaked a bit, since
what they were set up for before, was incorrect.
* Added two new interpolation types to Point Density: Constant and
Root. These work similarly to in proportional edit for example,
just gives a bit more choice over how hard-edged the particles
should look.
Replaced the previous KD-tree (for caching points) with a
BVH-tree (thanks to Andre 'jaguarandi' Pinto for help here!).
The bvh is quite a bit faster and doesn't suffer some of the
artifacts that were apparent with the kd-tree.
I've also added a choice of falloff types: Standard, Smooth, and
Sharp. Standard gives a harder edge, easier to see individual
particles, and when used with a larger radius, Smooth and Sharp
falloffs make a much cloudier appearance possible. See the image
below (note the settings and render times too)
http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/pointdensity_bvh.jpg
limit ray intersections like as for ray transparency). It
remains to be seen if it's even that useful, and was
preventing refracting materials behind volumes from
working easily.
SunSky didn't include skycolor in raytrace.
Note: there seems to be an error in sunsky when looking straight down,
so this option requires raytracing stuff not in outer space. :)
