This now uses decoupled ray marching, and removes the probalistic scattering.
What this means is that each AA sample will be slower but contain less noise,
hopefully giving less render time to reach the same noise levels.
For those following along, there's still a bunch of volume sampling improvements
to do: all-light sampling, multiple importance sampling, transmittance threshold,
better indirect light handling, multiple scatter approximation.
This basically records all volumes steps, which can then later be used multiple
time to take scattering samples, without having to step through the volume
again. From the paper:
"Importance Sampling Techniques for Path Tracing in Participating Media"
This works only on the CPU, due to usage of malloc/free.
Similar to surfaces, this will now always scatter rather than probabilistically
scattering or not depending on the transmittance.
This also makes calculation of branched path throughput non-probalistic, which
makes thing slower too. That's to be solved by decoupled ray marching later.
This removes a few optimizations to avoid exp() calls and division, they will be
added back later, at the moment it's more important to make the code easier to
understand and refactor.
Rather use random point in each step instead of giving the steps random sizes.
Gives a bit more accurate results with large step sizes, but also convenient
convention for later changes.
These can currently be accessed by adding an Attribute node and specifying one
of those three names. A Smoke/Fire node should be added at some point to make
this more convenient.
These values might change still before the release, in particular for flame the
meaning seems unclear, it's just values in the 0..1 range. This is useful for
color ramps, but it might be good if this was also available as temperature in
kelvin so it can be plugged into the blackbody node. But I couldn't figure out
from the smoke code if or how this corresponds to a physical unit.
Here's a (quite poor) example file for a fire + smoke setup:
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/27990
These are internally stored as a 3D image textures, but accessible like e.g.
UV coordinates though the attribute node and getattribute().
This is convenient for rendering e.g. smoke objects where data like density is
really a property of the mesh, and it avoids having to specify the smoke object
in a texture node, instead the material will work with any smoke domain.
This now supports multiple steps and subframe sampling of motion.
There is one difference for object and camera transform motion blur. It still
only supports two steps there, but the transforms are now sampled at subframe
times instead of the previous and next frame and then interpolated/extrapolated.
This will give different render results in some cases but it's more accurate.
Part of the code is from the summer of code project by Gavin Howard, but it has
been significantly rewritten and extended.
Gives ~11% speedup for hair.blend, ~10% for koro_final.blend
Also extract few common subexpressions in hair calculation.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D318
This adds a new option "Sample All Lights" to the Sampling panel in Cycles (Branched Path). When enabled, Cycles will sample all the lights in the scene for the indirect samples, instead of randomly picking one. This is already happening for direct samples, now you can optionally enable it for indirect.
Example file and renders:
Blend file: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/27411
Random: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=68033
All: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=68034
Sampling all lights is a bit slower, but there is less variance, so it should help in situations with many lights.
Patch by myself with some tweaks by Brecht.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D391
All textures are sampled bi-linear currently with the exception of OSL there texture sampling is fixed and set to smart bi-cubic.
This patch adds user control to this setting.
Added:
- bits to DNA / RNA in the form of an enum for supporting multiple interpolations types
- changes to the image texture node drawing code ( add enum)
- to ImageManager (this needs to know to allocate second texture when interpolation type is different)
- to node compiler (pass on interpolation type)
- to device tex_alloc this also needs to get the concept of multiple interpolation types
- implementation for doing non interpolated lookup for cuda and cpu
- implementation where we pass this along to osl ( this makes OSL also do linear untill I add smartcubic to the interface / DNA/ RNA)
Reviewers: brecht, dingto
Reviewed By: brecht
CC: dingto, venomgfx
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D317
MSVC 2008 ignores alignement attribute when assigning from unaligned
float4 vector, returned from other function. Now Cycles uses unaligned
loads instead of casts for win32 in x86 mode.
This adds an option in the Volume Sampling panel, which helps rendering lamps
inside or near volumes with less noise. It can also increase noise though and
needs improvements to support MIS and heterogeneous volumes, but since it's
useful in some cases already (especially world volumes) it's there now.
Based on the code in the old branch by Stuart, with modifications by Thomas
and Brecht.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D291
Indirect and Direct samples can now be clamped individually. This way we can clamp the indirect samples (fireflies), while keeping the direct highlights.
Example render: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=66586
WARNING: This breaks backwards compatibility. If you had Clamping enabled in an old file, you must re-enable either Direct/Indirect clamping or both again.
Reviewed by: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D303
