The offscreen dicing scale helps to significantly reduce memory usage,
by reducing the dicing rate for objects the further they are outside of
the camera view.
The dicing camera can be specified now, to keep the geometry fixed and
avoid crawling artifacts in animation. It is also useful for debugging,
to see the tesselation from a different camera location.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2891
No color pass because it's hard to define what to use as color in a volume.
Reviewers: sergey, brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2903
Progressive refine undoes memory saving from save buffers, so enabling
both does not make much sense. Previously enabling progressive refine
would disable denoising, but it should be the other way around since
denoise actually affects the render result.
Includes some code refactor for progressive refine render buffers, and
avoids recomputing tiles for each progressive sample.
This patch adds "Pixel Size" to the performance options, which allows to render
in a smaller resolution, which is especially useful for displays with high DPI.
Reviewers: Severin, dingto, sergey, brecht
Reviewed By: brecht
Subscribers: Severin, venomgfx, eyecandy, brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D1619
It doesn't seem that useful in practice, was mostly added to match some
other renderers but also seems to be causing user confusing and accidental
long render times. So let's just keep the UI simple and remove this.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2768
We already detect this automatically based on shading nodes and per shader
settings, and performance of this option is ok now all devices.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2767
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!
Previously, every RenderPass would have a bitfield that specified its type. That limits the number of passes to 32, which was reached a while ago.
However, most of the code already supported arbitrary RenderPasses since they were also used to store Multilayer EXR images.
Therefore, this commit completely removes the passflag from RenderPass and changes all code to use the unique pass name for identification.
Since Blender Internal relies on hardcoded passes and to preserve compatibility, 32 pass names are reserved for the old hardcoded passes.
To support these arbitrary passes, the Render Result compositor node now adds dynamic sockets. For compatibility, the old hardcoded sockets are always stored and just hidden when the corresponding pass isn't available.
To use these changes, the Render Engine API now includes a function that allows render engines to add arbitrary passes to the render result. To be able to add options for these passes, addons can now add their own properties to SceneRenderLayers.
To keep the compositor input node updated, render engine plugins have to implement a callback that registers all the passes that will be generated.
From a user perspective, nothing should change with this commit.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2443
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2444
This implements branched path tracing for the split kernel.
General approach is to store the ray state at a branch point, trace the
branched ray as normal, then restore the state as necessary before iterating
to the next part of the path. A state machine is used to advance the indirect
loop state, which avoids the need to add any new kernels. Each iteration the
state machine recreates as much state as possible from the stored ray to keep
overall storage down.
Its kind of hard to keep all the different integration loops in sync, so this
needs lots of testing to make sure everything is working correctly. We should
probably start trying to deduplicate the integration loops more now.
Nonbranched BMW is ~2% slower, while classroom is ~2% faster, other scenes
could use more testing still.
Reviewers: sergey, nirved
Reviewed By: nirved
Subscribers: Blendify, bliblubli
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2611
It uses an idea of accumulating all possible light reachable across the
light path (without taking shadow blocked into account) and accumulating
total shaded light across the path. Dividing second figure by first one
seems to be giving good estimate of the shadow.
In fact, to my knowledge, it's something really similar to what is
happening in the denoising branch, so we are aligned here which is good.
The workflow is following:
- Create an object which matches real-life object on which shadow is
to be catched.
- Create approximate similar material on that object.
This is needed to make indirect light properly affecting CG objects
in the scene.
- Mark object as Shadow Catcher in the Object properties.
Ideally, after doing that it will be possible to render the image and
simply alpha-over it on top of real footage.
Single program generally compiles kernels faster (2-3 times), loads faster,
takes less drive space (2-3 times), and reduces the number of cached kernels.
This is a speed up option which is mainly useful for viewport. Gives nice speedup in
the barbershop scene of 2x when replacing GI with AO after 2nd bounce without loosing
too much details.
Reviewers: brecht
Subscribers: eyecandy, venomgfx
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2383
The idea is to create several smaller BVH nodes for each of the motion
curve primitives. This acts as a forced spatial split for the single
primitive.
This gives up render time speedup of motion blurred hair in the cost
of extra memory usage. The numbers goes as:
BVH Steps Render time (sec) Memory usage (MB)
0 258 191
1 123 278
2 69 453
3 43 627
Scene used for the tests is the agent's hair from one of the barber
shop scenes.
Currently it's only limited to scenes without spatial split enabled,
since the spatial split builder requires some changes to work properly
with motion steps coordinates.
Since the beginning of times hair settings in cycles were global for
the whole scene but were located in the particle context. This causes
quite some trickery to get shots set up for the movies here in the
studio by forcing artists to create dummy particle system to change
settings of hair on the shot.
While ideally this settings should be properly become per-particle
system for the time being it will save sweat and blood to move the
settings to scene context.
Reviewers: brecht
Subscribers: jtheninja, eyecandy, venomgfx, Blendify
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2287
Main intention is to give some quick way to control scene's memory
usage by clamping textures which are too big. This is really handy
on the early production stages when you first create really nice
looking hi-res textures and only when it all works and approved
start investing time on optimizing your scene.
This is a new option in Scene Simplify panel and it acts as
following: when texture size is bigger than the given value it'll
be scaled down by half for until it fits into given limit.
There are various possible improvements, such as:
- Use threaded scaling using our own task manager.
This is actually one of the main reasons why image resize is
manually-implemented instead of using OIIO's resize. Other
reason here is that API seems limited to construct 3D texture
description easily.
- Vectorization of uchar4/float4/half4 textures.
- Use something smarter than box filter.
Was playing with some other filters, but not sure they are
really better: they kind of causes more fuzzy edges.
Even with such a TODOs in the code the option is already quite
useful.
Reviewers: brecht
Reviewed By: brecht
Subscribers: jtheninja, Blendify, gregzaal, venomgfx
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2362
For the multi-GPU case users still have to reconfigure the devices they want to use.
Based on patch from Lukas Stockner.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2347
This can be used together with camera culling to keep nearby objects visible in
reflections, using a minimum distance within which objects are visible. It is
also useful to cull small objects far from the camera.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2332
Previously, it was only possible to choose a single GPU or all of that type (CUDA or OpenCL).
Now, a toggle button is displayed for every device.
These settings are tied to the PCI Bus ID of the devices, so they're consistent across hardware addition and removal (but not when swapping/moving cards).
From the code perspective, the more important change is that now, the compute device properties are stored in the Addon preferences of the Cycles addon, instead of directly in the User Preferences.
This allows for a cleaner implementation, removing the Cycles C API functions that were called by the RNA code to specify the enum items.
Note that this change is neither backwards- nor forwards-compatible, but since it's only a User Preference no existing files are broken.
Reviewers: #cycles, brecht
Reviewed By: #cycles, brecht
Subscribers: brecht, juicyfruit, mib2berlin, Blendify
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2338
In scenes with many lights, some of them might have a very small contribution to some pixels, but the shadow rays are traced anyways.
To avoid that, this patch adds probabilistic termination to light samples - if the contribution before checking for shadowing is below a user-defined threshold, the sample will be discarded with probability (1 - (contribution / threshold)) and otherwise kept, but weighted more to remain unbiased.
This is the same approach that's also used in path termination based on length.
Note that the rendering remains unbiased with this option, it just adds a bit of noise - but if the setting is used moderately, the speedup gained easily outweighs the additional noise.
Reviewers: #cycles
Subscribers: sergey, brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2217
Displacement is now a per material setting, which means old files will have to
be updated if they had used displacement. Cool side effect of this change is
material previews now show displacement.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2140
Subdivision options can now be found in the subsurf modifier. The modifier must
be the last in the stack or the options will be unavailable. Catmull-Clark
subdivision is still unavailable and will fallback to linear subdivision instead
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2109
While it's an extra option added to the interface which might not be
fully obvious for artists, it allows to save up to 20% of memory in
hairy scenes.
This is high enough memory saver in my opinion which might become
handy for some production files where it's more important to make
scene to fit into memory rather than trying to use more optimal BVH
structure but go into swap or crash.
Reviewers: dingto, brecht
Reviewed By: dingto, brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2090
