added some missing functions too - which are not used yep but should be there for api completeness.
* CDDM_set_mloop
* CDDM_set_mpoly
* BLI_mempool_count
Hair render: using strand "Blender Unit" size didn't correctly
clip for larger/wider strands. Now code clips strands based
on the maximum width.
Also found bad code for using clipping flags, which was mixed up,
and probably caused hair strands to be missing in cases.
Now bounding boxes are computed per object, and checked first before
zbuffering objects. For strands, bounding boxes are computed per
original face in the mesh. Overall the speed improvement from this
is quite small (zbuffering is rarely the bottleneck), but it seems a
sensible thing to do anyway.
They now also store a list of samples per pixel, and then get
shaded together with the ztransp samples. This comes with a
slight speed hit, but mainly memory might be a concern. However,
testing some peach scenes I haven't problems.
of strands changing between frames, vector blur couldn't work. Now
speed vectors are interpolated from the surface. This also means
child particles don't have to be computed in the previous and next
frames, so saves time too.
============================
- Strand render now has options to remove child strands as
the object's faces becomes smaller, in the Simplification
particle panel.
- "Reference Size" is the approximate size of the object on
screen, after which simplification starts.
- "Rate" is how fast strands are removed.
- "Transition" is the percentage of strands being faded out as
they are removed.
- Another "Viewport" option removes strands on faces that are
outside of the viewport. "Rate" again controls how fast these
are removed.
- Strand render in Blender Units now has an adjustable minimum
width. Below this minimum width, strands start fading out
instead of getting smaller.
=================
Big commit, but little user visible changes.
- Dupliverts and duplifaces are now rendered as instances, instead
of storing all of the geometry for each dupli, now an instance is
created with a matrix transform refering to the source object.
This should allow us to render tree leaves more memory efficient.
- Radiosity and to some degree raytracing of such objects is not
really efficient still. For radiosity this is fundamentally hard
to solve, but raytracing an octree could be created for each object,
but the current octree code with it's fixed size doesn't allow this
efficiently.
- The regression tests survived, but with I expect that some bugs will
pop up .. hopefully not too many :).
Implementation Notes
====================
- Dupligroups and linked meshes are not rendered as instances yet,
since they can in fact be different due to various reasons,
instancing of these types of duplis that are the same can be added
for them at a later point.
- Each ObjectRen now stores it's own database, instead of there being
one big databases of faces, verts, .. . Which objects that are actually
rendered are defined by the list of ObjectRenInstances, which all refer
to an ObjectRen.
- Homogeneous coordinatess and clipping is now not stored in vertices
anymore, but instead computed on the fly. This couldn't work for
instances. That does mean some extra computation has to be done, but
memory lookups can be slow too, and this saves some memory. Overall
I didn't find a significant speed impact.
- OSA rendering for solid and ztransp now is different. Instead of e.g.
going 8 times over the databases times and rendering the z-buffer, it
now goes over the database once and renders each polygon 8 times. That
was necessary to keep instances efficient, and can also give some
performance improvement without instances.
- There was already instancing support in the yafray export code, now it
uses Blender's render instances for export.
- UV and color layer storage in the render was a bit messy before, now
should be easier to understand.
- convertblender.c was reorganized somewhat. Regular render, speedvector
and baking now use a single function to create the database, previously
there was code duplicated for it.
- Some of these changes were done with future multithreading of scene
and shadow buffer creation in mind, though especially for scene creation
much work remains to be done to make it threadsafe, since it also involves
a lot of code from blenkernel, and there is an ugly conflict with the way
dupli groups work here .. though in the render code itself it's almost there.
=========
- Fix crash in particle transform with the particle system not editable.
- Particle child distribution and caching is now multithreaded.
- Child particles now have a separate Render Amount next to the existing
Amount. The render amount particles are now only distributed and cached
at render time, which should make editing with child particles faster.
- Two new options for diffuse strand shading:
- Surface Diffuse: computes the strand normal taking the normal at
the surface into account.
- Blending Distance: the distance in Blender units over which to
blend in the normal at the surface.
- Special strand rendering for more memory efficient and faster hair and
grass. This is a work in progress, and has a number of known issues,
don't report bugs to me for this feature yet.
More info:
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/particles/
