- Compositor now frees memory of buffers internally used in groups
immediately. This wasn't part of the event-based cache anyway
- New option: "Free Texture Images" (in render Output panel). This
frees after each render of each scene all images and mipmaps as
used by textures. As reference it prints total amount of MB freed.
- Render stage 'creating speed vectors' had no ESC checking yet
- Made drawing scanline updates during render draw 1 scanline less...
dunno, still hunting for weird opengl crashes.
- 3D preview render didn't properly skip sequence or composit render.
I noticed still several cases where the Imbuf library was called within a
thread... and that whilst the Imbuf itself isn't threadsafe. Also the
thread lock I added in rendering for loading images actually didn't
work, because then it was still possible both threads were accessing the
MEM_malloc function at same time.
This commit nearly fully replaces ImBuf calls in compositor (giving another
nice speedup btw, the way preview images in Nodes were calculated used
clumsy imbuf scaling code).
I've also centralized the 'mutex' locking for threading, which now only
resides in BLI_threads.h. This is used to secure the last ImBuf calls
I cannot replace, which is loading images and creating mipmaps.
Really hope we get something more stable now!
Fixing case where BLI_make_file_string reads one byte before passed in string when the string is empty.
Leftover from patch tracker item #2740 - thanks Andrew Zabolotny.
Also fixed the part that made sure exactly one slash is appended at the end of the dir - comment wasn't telling what the code did here :)
1) Accumulation buffer alpha handling
Accumulating colors in an accumulation is simple; a weighting factor can
make sure colors don't over- or undersaturate.
For alpha this is a bit more complex... especially because the masks for
vectorblur are anti-aliased themselves with alpha values. Up to now I just
premultiplied the mask-alpha with the actual color alpha, which worked OK
for solid masks, but not for transparent ones. I thought that would be an
acceptable situation, since 'ztra' faces only get blurred with alpha==1.
However, it gives bad results when using 'mist' in Blender, which just
gives pixels an alpha value based on camera distance. In these cases the
alpha became oversaturated, accumulating into too high values.
The solution is to store the mask-alpha separately, only premultiply this
alpha with the weighting factor to define the accumulation amount.
This is the math:
blendfactor: the accumulation factor for a vectorblur pass
passRGBA: color and alpha value of the current to be accumulated pass
accRGBA: color and alpha value of accumulation buffer (initialized
with original picture values)
maskA: the mask's alpha itself
accRGBA = (1 - maskA*blendfactor)*accRGBA + (maskA*blendfactor)*passRGBA
This formula accumulates alpha values equally to colors, only using the
mask-alpha as 'alpha-over' operation.
It all sounds very logical, I just write this extensive log because I
couldn't find any technical doc about this case. :)
2) Creating efficient masks with camera-shake
Vector blur can only work well when there's a clear distinction between
what moves, and what doesn't move. This you can solve for example by
rendering complex scenes in multiple layers. This isn't always easy, or
just a lot of work. Especially when the camera itself moves, the mask
created by the vectorblur code becomes the entire image.
A very simple solution is to introduce a small threshold for
moving pixels, which can efficiently separate the hardly-moving pixels
from the moving ones, and thus create nice looking masks.
You can find this new option in the VectorBlur node, as 'min speed'.
This mimimum speed is in pixel units. A value of just 3 will already
clearly separate the background from foreground.
Note; to make this work OK, all vectors in an image are scaled 3 pixels
smaller, to ensure everything keeps looking coherent.
Test renders; 'Elephants Dream' scene with lotsof moving parts; rendered
without OSA, image textures, shadow or color correction.
No vectorblur:
http://www.blender.org/bf/vblur.jpg
With vectorblur, showing the alpha-saturation for mist:
http://www.blender.org/bf/vblur1.jpg
New accumulation formula:
http://www.blender.org/bf/vblur2.jpg
Same image, but now with a 3 pixel minimum speed threshold:
http://www.blender.org/bf/vblur3.jpg
Next frame, without minimum speed
http://www.blender.org/bf/vblur4.jpg
Same frame with speed threshold:
http://www.blender.org/bf/vblur5.jpg
(Only 20 steps of vectorblur were applied for clarity).
With two adjacent quads sharing three vertices, splitting to triangles
could create duplicate triangles. This broke unwrapping of Suzanne near
the nose, where there is a sort of t-joint with quads that isn't really
a t-joint. Now works fine:
http://users.pandora.be/blendix/suzanne.png
Just use SHIFT-F3 and save an image.
Basically all this does is copy the zbuffer to a new Image buffer
and pass that to the save image function.
Sample output:
http://www.cs.umn.edu/~mein/blender/kungfu_zbuf255.jpg
Also thanks to Jesterking for helping me debug dumbness... ;)
and the nice screenshot.
Kent
The code that generated mipmaps took a real long time to do it... on a
5k x 5k image it took here (no optim, debug compile) 32.5 sec.
Recoded the very old filtering routine, which already brought it down to
2.8 seconds. Then tested if we even need this filtering... in many cases
the images are painted or photographs, which is filtered OK already.
Without the filter, the mipmap timing went down to 0.39 second. :)
http://www.blender.org/bf/filters/index1.html
Here's an example of two 'mips' generated with or without gauss filter.
Note that aliasing in an image remains there... which can be a wanted
effect anyway.
So; added the gauss filter as option in making mipmaps. Also had to
reshuffle the buttons there in a more logical manner.
There's also disabled code in the do_versions to set 'gauss' on in older
files. Will be enabled during release time.
sockets were not used yet... now they're verified on read, and written
in socket stack data on adding new nodes.
Also the buttons in Nodes use these values now. Special request from
Nathan Vegdahl who seems to be messing around with my precious nodes! :)
Three more changes for the Mesh module:
(1) Bug fix for UV vertices ("sticky"). me->msticky was not being updated
when vertices were added or deleted from the mesh.
(2) Vertex, edge and face .extend() methods accept zero-length sequences
instead of throwing an exception. (Note that not giving any argument
is still an error).
(3) Edge and face .extend() methods ignore "invalid" edges or faces which
have the same vertex twice instead of throwing an exception. Cam and I
argued about this for a while... :-)
Ken
get sampled on larger distance. It actually just flattens bump when the
sampled area is (much) larger than pixel size, to prevent weird things
like:
current render:
http://www.blender.org/bf/b1.jpg
distance corrected:
http://www.blender.org/bf/b2.jpg
(image based on Alexander file :)
Tested on env's dinos too... seems to work, but we'll see.
- LampHalos can be rendered separately too. Just disable 'Solid' in a
layer and keep 'Halo' option enabled.
- Note that disabling 'Solid' will still fill in Z values for the solid
faces, to provide occlusion information for the Ztransp and Halo layer
options. The latter didn't work this way until now for OSA render.
ALso note that that Ztransp+LampHalo still isn't good marriage... it
renders a bit weird, but that's an old issue. :)
- Appending Images now re-assigns relative paths, to match with the file
as currently being used
Bugfix:
- Memory error in creating preview render rects... gave no issues here,
but i guess that's not saying anything! Hope its more stable now. :)
- it now correctly pre-multiplies with alpha the RGB values for the
antialised mask (alpha artefacts were visible)
- The transparent layer will add speed vectors on top of the solid layer,
cancelling out cases where the solid layer was not moving (like in its
own antialising.
This works fine, for as long you don't render in a single pass trans-
parent faces that move on top of not-moving solid faces.
You now can set a Preview panel in the Image window, to define a sub-rect
of an image to be processed. Works like the preview in 3D Window. Just
press SHIFT+P to get it activated. Very nice speedup!
This is how it works:
- The compositor still uses the scene image size (including % setting) for
Viewer or Composite output size
- If a preview exists, it calculates the cropped rect from its position
in the Image window, and stores that in the Scene render data
- On composite execute, it copies only this part from the 'generator nodes',
right now Images or Render Results. That makes the entire composite tree
only using small rects, so it will execute fast.
- Also the render window will only display the cropped rect, and on F12
only the cropped part is being executed
- On rendering in background mode, the cropping is ignored though.
Usability notes:
- translating or zooming view will automatically invoke a recalculation
- if you zoom in on details, the calculated rect will even become smaller
- only one Imagewindow can have this Preview Panel, to prevent conflicts of
what the cropped area should be. Compositing is on Scene level, not local
per image window. (Note; 3D Previews are local per window!)
- Closing the preview panel will invoke a full-size recalculation
- All passes/layers from rendering are nicely cropped, including Z and
vectors.
The work to make the compositor do cropping was simple, but getting the
Image window displaying correctly and get all events OK was a lot of work...
indeed, we need to refactor Image Window usage once. Sorry for making the
mess even bigger now. :) I've tried not to interfere with UV edit or Paint
though... only when you're in compositing mode the panel will work.
BUG fix:
3D Preview render didn't work when multiple layers were set in the current
scene.
- Mark Border Seam: mark edges on the border of face selection as seam.
- Clear Seam: clears seams in selected faces.
Hotkey: Ctrl+E
- Alt+RMB Click: mark/clear edge as seam
- Alt+Shift+RMB Click: mark/clear seams along the shortest/straightest path
from last marked seam. The cost of the path also includes some measure of
'straightness' next to the typical distance to make things work more
predicatble and edgeloop friendly. Note that this cuts a path from edge to
edge, not vertex to vertex. That gives some nice control over the direction
of the seam.
Also includes:
- Removed old LSCM code.
- Fix updates glitches with DerivedMesh/Subsurf drawing in FaceSelect mode.
Now there's a drawMappedFacesTex instead of drawFacesTex.
- Minimize Stretch menu entry called Limit Stitch.
- Removed the lasttface global, was being set before it was used anyway, so
might as wel return from a function.
- Moved some backbuf sampling code to drawview.c from editmesh, so it can be
used by Faceselect and VPaint.
- Use BLI_heap in parametrizer.c.
as triangles, with a tag bit to denote which triangle was which part of
the quad. That was hardcoded bit 0x800000, which allows a maximum of
about 8 million quads...
I've made this a nice #define, set to be 16 times larger. So, now the
facejunkies can go up to 128 Million faces, were it not that this will eat
up a load of memory!
I only have 1 Gig in this machine. A test with 9M vertices and 7.5M quads
eats up 912 MB of memory already. If this becomes a real issue, I know
tricks how to make the vertices 20 bytes smaller, and faces 4 bytes, which
would in the above case save about 200 MB. Not much... but probably worth
the try? A much better method is of course 'bucketing' the renderdata per
tile. It's a spec of the render recode, but not a quicky to add.
Also: bug fix in curve code. There was a short counter still, crashing on
large curves with resol set to 1024 :)
- Composit cache now gets fully freed on a render. Each output socket of a
node stores the entire image... and while render that's a waste of memory
- Sky 'paper' render was using wrong texture coordinates
- Found missing test_break() in ztransp rendering.
- ZTransp render now also delivers Z values and Speed vectors in passes
Note that speed vectors accumulate within a pixel to store the minimum,
so rendering ztransp on top of a non-moving plane won't give speed...
Best results you get is by rendering it in a separate layer.
The Z value stored is the closest visible transparent face in the pixel.
Fixes:
- Render to 'spare page' has been enabled again. Because of the strict
separation of Render and UI, but especially because a 'render result' now
can consist of unlimited images, I've not made this a Render feature.
Instead, the render-window itself stores the 'spare' image... I also
had to change the convention for it a bit.
Now, instead of having two "render buffers" (which was a render feature),
the RenderWindow will store each previous frame on a re-render. This
storing will only start after you've pressed 'Jkey' once, but then always
will happen for as long the rendered image is same size as previously.
For clarity, I've also renamed the window title, to 'previous frame'.
- RenderWindow shows alpha again on Akey
- Display of the Zvalues in ImageWindow has been tweaked. White now denotes
closest, and the color range goes from camera clip-sta to clip-end.
- Bugfix: on splitting/merging/duplicating windows, the 3D Previewrender was
not always freed correctly, potentially causing crashes or memory leaks.
to..
if (nu->knotsu) MEM_freeN(nu->knotsu);
Python created curves have nu->knotsu set to zero and was throwing.
Memoryblock free: attempt to free NULL pointer
vertex locations, not global coordinates. This ensures consistant
autosmoothing for each frame. Also fixes missing vectorblur for parts.
Nice task for a dev: put autosmooth code in end of modifier stack... then
it also shows in 3D window
- BUG FIX! I noticed the last tile rendered quite slow, and even did not
update scanlines. Found out that the main tiles processor didn't go
to sleep when the last tile was rendered, because it detected a free
possible thread. This caused the main thread to go into a very tight
loop, eating up a lot of cpu and blocking the other thread.
* 'scons blenderplayer' links the blenderplayer now correctly also on win32-vc.
If the OS X-folks can verify the linking of the blenderplayer too, we'd have
much of the needed work done.
+ 'scons blenderplayer' builds blender AND blenderplayer now (tested on Linux
only, but was only linking issue, so should work on other platforms too).
NOTE: I noticed some compileflags for GE specific libs that were left out -
I re-enabled them in the SConscripts, but I'm going to do a test build my-
self now, so if there are problems with them on win32, I probably already
know about them :)
