Regular rendering now works tiled, and supports save buffers to save memory
during render and cache render results.
Brick texture node by Thomas.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/Textures#Brick_Texture
Image texture Blended Box Mapping.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/Textures#Image_Texturehttp://mango.blender.org/production/blended_box/
Various bug fixes by Sergey and Campbell.
* Fix for reading freed memory in some node setups.
* Fix incorrect memory read when synchronizing mesh motion.
* Fix crash appearing when direct light usage is different on different layers.
* Fix for vector pass gives wrong result in some circumstances.
* Fix for wrong resolution used for rendering Render Layer node.
* Option to cancel rendering when doing initial synchronization.
* No more texture limit when using CPU render.
* Many fixes for new tiled rendering.
* Multithreaded image loading, each thread can load a separate image.
* Better multithreading for multiple instanced meshes, different threads can now
build BVH's for different meshes, rather than all cooperating on the same mesh.
Especially noticeable for dynamic BVH building for the viewport, gave about
2x faster build on 8 core in fairly complex scene with many objects.
* The main thread waiting for worker threads can now also work itself, so
(num_cores + 1) threads will be working, this supposedly gives better
performance on some operating systems, but did not measure performance for
this very detailed yet.
=== 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.
Currently supported passes:
* Combined, Z, Normal, Object Index, Material Index, Emission, Environment,
Diffuse/Glossy/Transmission x Direct/Indirect/Color
Not supported yet:
* UV, Vector, Mist
Only enabled for CPU devices at the moment, will do GPU tweaks tommorrow,
also for environment importance sampling.
Documentation:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Passes
By default lighting from the world is computed solely with indirect light
sampling. However for more complex environment maps this can be too noisy, as
sampling the BSDF may not easily find the highlights in the environment map
image. By enabling this option, the world background will be sampled as a lamp,
with lighter parts automatically given more samples.
Map Resolution specifies the size of the importance map (res x res). Before
rendering starts, an importance map is generated by "baking" a grayscale image
from the world shader. This will then be used to determine which parts of the
background are light and so should receive more samples than darker parts.
Higher resolutions will result in more accurate sampling but take more setup
time and memory.
Patch by Mike Farnsworth, thanks!
The rendering device is now set in User Preferences > System, where you can
choose between OpenCL/CUDA and devices. Per scene you can then still choose
to use CPU or GPU rendering.
Load balancing still needs to be improved, now it just splits the entire
render in two, that will be done in a separate commit.
* 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.
* auto/fixed threads option is used now, patch by Thomas.
* remove unused CUDA_LIBRARIES, library is dynamically loaded
* fix mesh XML export operator for API update
