By default it will now set the step size to the voxel size for smoke and
volume objects, and 1/10th the bounding box for procedural volume shaders.
New settings are:
* Scene render/preview step rate: to globally adjust detail and performance
* Material step rate: multiplied with auto detected per-object step size
* World step size: distance to steo for world shader
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D1777
This feature takes some inspiration from
"RenderMan: An Advanced Path Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering" and
"A Hierarchical Automatic Stopping Condition for Monte Carlo Global Illumination"
The basic principle is as follows:
While samples are being added to a pixel, the adaptive sampler writes half
of the samples to a separate buffer. This gives it two separate estimates
of the same pixel, and by comparing their difference it estimates convergence.
Once convergence drops below a given threshold, the pixel is considered done.
When a pixel has not converged yet and needs more samples than the minimum,
its immediate neighbors are also set to take more samples. This is done in order
to more reliably detect sharp features such as caustics. A 3x3 box filter that
is run periodically over the tile buffer is used for that purpose.
After a tile has finished rendering, the values of all passes are scaled as if
they were rendered with the full number of samples. This way, any code operating
on these buffers, for example the denoiser, does not need to be changed for
per-pixel sample counts.
Reviewed By: brecht, #cycles
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D4686
With upcoming light group passes, for them to sum up correctly to the combined
pass the clamping must be more fine grained.
This also has the advantage that if one light is particularly noisy, it does
not diminish the contribution from other lights which do not need as much
clamping.
Clamp values on existing scenes will need to be tweaked to get similar results,
there is no automatic conversion possible which would give the same results as
before.
Implemented by Lukas, with tweaks by Brecht.
Part of D4837
Custom render passes are added in the Shader AOVs panel in the view layer
settings, with a name and data type. In shader nodes, an AOV Output node
is then used to output either a value or color to the pass.
Arbitrary names can be used for these passes, as long as they don't conflict
with built-in passes that are enabled. The AOV Output node can be used in both
material and world shader nodes.
Implemented by Lukas, with tweaks by Brecht.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D4837
This means the shader can now be used for procedural texturing. New
settings on the node are Samples, Inside, Local Only and Distance.
Original patch by Lukas with further changes by Brecht.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3479
Increasing the samplig dimensions like this is not optimal, I'm looking
into some deeper changes to reuse the random number and change the RR
probabilities, but this should fix the bug for now.
This is more important now that we will have tigther volume bounds that
we hit multiple times. It also avoids some noise due to RR previously
affecting these surfaces, which shouldn't have been the case and should
eventually be fixed for transparent BSDFs as well.
For non-volume scenes I found no performance impact on NVIDIA or AMD.
For volume scenes the noise decrease and fixed artifacts are worth the
little extra render time, when there is any.
We now continue transparent paths after diffuse/glossy/transmission/volume
bounces are exceeded. This avoids unexpected boundaries in volumes with
transparent boundaries. It is also required for MIS to work correctly with
transparent surfaces, as we also continue through these in shadow rays.
The main visible changes is that volumes will now be lit by the background
even at volume bounces 0, same as surfaces.
Fixes T53914 and T54103.
It is basically brute force volume scattering within the mesh, but part
of the SSS code for faster performance. The main difference with actual
volume scattering is that we assume the boundaries are diffuse and that
all lighting is coming through this boundary from outside the volume.
This gives much more accurate results for thin features and low density.
Some challenges remain however:
* Significantly more noisy than BSSRDF. Adding Dwivedi sampling may help
here, but it's unclear still how much it helps in real world cases.
* Due to this being a volumetric method, geometry like eyes or mouth can
darken the skin on the outside. We may be able to reduce this effect,
or users can compensate for it by reducing the scattering radius in
such areas.
* Sharp corners are quite bright. This matches actual volume rendering
and results in some other renderers, but maybe not so much real world
objects.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3054
Previously we stored each color channel in a single closure, which was
convenient for sampling a closure and channel together. But this doesn't
work so well for algorithms where we want to render multiple color
channels together.
Goal is to reduce OpenCL kernel recompilations.
Currently viewport renders are still set to use 64 closures as this seems to
be faster and we don't want to cause a performance regression there. Needs
to be investigated.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2775
With a Titan Xp, reduces path trace local memory from 1092MB to 840MB.
Benchmark performance was within 1% with both RX 480 and Titan Xp.
Original patch was implemented by Sergey.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2249
This was originally done with the first sample in the kernel for better
performance, but it doesn't work anymore with atomics. Any benefit was
very minor anyway, too small to measure it seems.
This is done by storing only a subset of PathRadiance, and by storing
direct light immediately in the main PathRadiance. Saves about 10% of
CUDA stack memory, and simplifies subsurface indirect ray code.
Similar to what we did for area lights previously, this should help
preserve stratification when using multiple BSDFs in theory. Improvements
are not easily noticeable in practice though, because the number of BSDFs
is usually low. Still nice to eliminate one sampling dimension.
Previously the Sobol pattern suffered from some correlation issues that
made the outline of objects like a smoke domain visible. This helps
simplify the code and also makes some other optimizations possible.
This was needed when we accessed OSL closure memory after shader evaluation,
which could get overwritten by another shader evaluation. But all closures
are immediatley converted to ShaderClosure now, so no longer needed.
Also pass by value and don't write back now that it is just a hash for seeding
and no longer an LCG state. Together this makes CUDA a tiny bit faster in my
tests, but mainly simplifies code.
Since all the shadow catchers are already assumed to be in the footage,
the shadows they cast on each other are already in the footage too. So
don't just let shadow catchers skip self, but all shadow catchers.
Another justification is that it should not matter if the shadow catcher
is modeled as one object or multiple separate objects, the resulting
render should be the same.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2763
Tweaked the path radiance summing and alpha to accommodate for possible contribution of
light by transparent surface bounces happening prior to shadow catcher intersection.
This commit will change the way how shadow catcher results looks when was behind semi
transparent object, but the old result seemed to be fully wrong: there were big artifacts
when alpha-overing the result on some actual footage.
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!
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
Simplifies code quite a bit, making it shorter and easier to extend.
Currently no functional changes for users, but is required for the
upcoming work of shadow catcher support with OpenCL.
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.
