=== BVH build time optimizations ===
* BVH building was multithreaded. Not all building is multithreaded, packing
and the initial bounding/splitting is still single threaded, but recursive
splitting is, which was the main bottleneck.
* Object splitting now uses binning rather than sorting of all elements, using
code from the Embree raytracer from Intel.
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/embree-photo-realistic-ray-tracing-kernels/
* Other small changes to avoid allocations, pack memory more tightly, avoid
some unnecessary operations, ...
These optimizations do not work yet when Spatial Splits are enabled, for that
more work is needed. There's also other optimizations still needed, in
particular for the case of many low poly objects, the packing step and node
memory allocation.
BVH raytracing time should remain about the same, but BVH build time should be
significantly reduced, test here show speedup of about 5x to 10x on a dual core
and 5x to 25x on an 8-core machine, depending on the scene.
=== Threads ===
Centralized task scheduler for multithreading, which is basically the
CPU device threading code wrapped into something reusable.
Basic idea is that there is a single TaskScheduler that keeps a pool of threads,
one for each core. Other places in the code can then create a TaskPool that they
can drop Tasks in to be executed by the scheduler, and wait for them to complete
or cancel them early.
=== Normal ====
Added a Normal output to the texture coordinate node. This currently
gives the object space normal, which is the same under object animation.
In the future this might become a "generated" normal so it's also stable for
deforming objects, but for now it's already useful for non-deforming objects.
=== Render Layers ===
Per render layer Samples control, leaving it to 0 will use the common scene
setting.
Environment pass will now render environment even if film is set to transparent.
Exclude Layers" added. Scene layers (all object that influence the render,
directly or indirectly) are shared between all render layers. However sometimes
it's useful to leave out some object influence for a particular render layer.
That's what this option allows you to do.
=== Filter Glossy ===
When using a value higher than 0.0, this will blur glossy reflections after
blurry bounces, to reduce noise at the cost of accuracy. 1.0 is a good
starting value to tweak.
Some light paths have a low probability of being found while contributing much
light to the pixel. As a result these light paths will be found in some pixels
and not in others, causing fireflies. An example of such a difficult path might
be a small light that is causing a small specular highlight on a sharp glossy
material, which we are seeing through a rough glossy material. With path tracing
it is difficult to find the specular highlight, but if we increase the roughness
on the material the highlight gets bigger and softer, and so easier to find.
Often this blurring will be hardly noticeable, because we are seeing it through
a blurry material anyway, but there are also cases where this will lead to a
loss of detail in lighting.
correct with instancing.
Actually such object will not work in many places, e.g. transforming vertices
in edit mode doesn't work and textures will be misapplied in Blender Internal,
so these should be avoided.
disk to be reused by the next render.
This is useful for rendering animations where only the camera or materials change.
Note that saving the BVH to disk only to be removed for the next frame is slower
if this is not the case and the meshes do actually change.
For a render, it will save bvh files to the cache user directory, and remove all
cache files from other renders. The files are named using a MD5 hash based on the
mesh, to verify if the meshes are still the same.
Fix#29475: remove node from properties editor crash on windows. This was a bug
in the UI code, which code access removed data.
Fix OpenCL still being used in a case where Experimental was disabled.
Fix msvc debug warning in md5 code.
Some drivers don't support passing include paths with spaces in them, nor does
the opencl spec specify anything about how to quote/escape such paths, so for
now we just resolved #includes ourselves. Alternative would have been to use c
preprocessor, but this also resolves all #ifdefs, which we do not want.
* Fix#29354: crash on branch file. Note that for best compatibility, you need
to save your files with one of the latest branch builds, since not all version
patching code was moved to trunk.
* Rename "Cycles" to "Cycles Render" in info header menu.
* Code tweaks to try to fix#29301. It's not a real solution though, I'm thinking
cause is extended precision for floats on some cpu's, used in one case but not
in the other, leading to bounding box intersection issue...
* Fix excessive fireflies in Velvet BSDF (patch by David).
* Disable some unused SSE code
* Remove RTTI disabling flags for now, this is giving some compile issues and
was only needed of OSL which we're not using yet.
* Add back option to bundle CUDA kernel binaries with builds.
* Disable runtime CUDA kernel compilation on Windows, couldn't get this working,
since it seems to depend on visual studio being installed, even though for
this particular case it shouldn't be needed. CMake only at the moment.
* Runtime compilation on linux/mac should now work if nvcc is not installed in
the default location, but available in PATH.
* Disable precompiled cuda binaries, always do at run time
* Change preview samples default to 10
* Hide volume panels since they don't do anything yet
using them, but rather do it now that I have the chance still. Highlights:
* Wood and Marble merged into a single Wave texture
* Clouds + Distorted Noise merged into new Noise node
* Blend renamed to Gradient
* Stucci removed, was mostly useful for old bump
* Noise removed, will come back later, didn't actually work yet
* Depth setting is now Detail socket, which accepts float values
* Scale socket instead of Size socket
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/Textures
* Passes renamed to samples
* Camera lens radius renamed to aperature size/blades/rotation
* Glass and fresnel nodes input is now index of refraction
* Glossy and velvet fresnel socket removed
* Mix/add closure node renamed to mix/add shader node
* Blend weight node added for shader mixing weights
There is some version patching code for reading existing files, but it's not
perfect, so shaders may work a bit different.
* Fix missing update when editing objects with emission materials.
* Fix preview pass rendering set to 1 not showing full resolution.
* Fix CUDA runtime compiling failing due to missing cache directory.
* Use settings from first render layer for visibility and material override.
And a bunch of incomplete and still disabled code mostly related to closure
sampling.
* OpenCL now only uses GPU/Accelerator devices, it's only confusing if CPU
device is used, easy to enable in the code for debugging.
* OpenCL kernel binaries are now cached for faster startup after the first
time compiling.
* CUDA kernels can now be compiled and cached at runtime if the CUDA toolkit
is installed. This means that even if the build does not have CUDA enabled,
it's still possible to use it as long as you install the toolkit.
