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
Also removing the curve system manager which only stored a few curve intersection
settings. These are all changes towards making shape and subdivision settings
per-object instead of per-scene, but there is more work to do here.
Ref T73778
Depends on D8013
Maniphest Tasks: T73778
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8014
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
The kernel did not work correctly when these were disabled anyway. The
optimized BVH traversal for the no instances case was also only used on
the CPU, so no longer makes sense to keep.
Ref T73778
Depends on D8010
Maniphest Tasks: T73778
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8011
The hair BSDFs are already designed to assume this, and disabling backface
culling would break them in some cases.
Ref T73778
Depends on D8009
Maniphest Tasks: T73778
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D8010
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:
This never really worked as it was supposed to. The main goal of this is to
turn noise from sampling tiny hairs into multiple layers of transparency that
do not need to be sampled stochastically. However the implementation of this
worked by randomly discarding hair intersections in BVH traversal, which
defeats the purpose.
If it ever comes back, it's best implemented outside the kernel as a preprocess
that changes hair radius before BVH building. This would also make it work with
Embree, where it's not supported now. But it's not so clear anymore that with
many AA samples and GPU rendering this feature is as helpful as it once was for
CPU raytracers with few AA samples.
The benefit of removing this feature is improved hair ray tracing performance,
tested on NVIDIA Titan Xp:
bmw27: +0.37%
classroom: +0.26%
fishy_cat: -7.36%
koro: -12.98%
pabellon: -0.12%
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D4532
Note that this is turned off by default and must be enabled at build time with the CMake WITH_CYCLES_EMBREE flag.
Embree must be built as a static library with ray masking turned on, the `make deps` scripts have been updated accordingly.
There, Embree is off by default too and must be enabled with the WITH_EMBREE flag.
Using Embree allows for much faster rendering of deformation motion blur while reducing the memory footprint.
TODO: GPU implementation, deduplication of data, leveraging more of Embrees features (e.g. tessellation cache).
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3682
This is a physically-based, easy-to-use shader for rendering hair and fur,
with controls for melanin, roughness and randomization.
Based on the paper "A Practical and Controllable Hair and Fur Model for
Production Path Tracing".
Implemented by Leonardo E. Segovia and Lukas Stockner, part of Google
Summer of Code 2018.
This save a little memory and copying in the kernel by storing only a 4x3
matrix instead of a 4x4 matrix. We already did this in a few places, and
those don't need to be special exceptions anymore now.