Using this paper: Sven Woop, Watertight Ray/Triangle Intersection
http://jcgt.org/published/0002/01/05/paper.pdf
This change is expected to address quite reasonable amount of reports from the
bug tracker, plus it might help reducing the noise in some scenes.
Unfortunately, it's currently about 7% slower than the previous solution with
pre-computed triangle plane equations, but maybe with some smart tweaks to the
code (tests reshuffle, using SIMD in a nice way or so) we can avoid the speed
regression.
But perhaps smartest thing to do here would be to change single triangle / ray
intersection with multiple triangles / ray intersections. That's how Embree does
this and it's watertight single ray intersection is not any faster that this.
Currently only triangle intersection is modified accordingly to the paper, in
the future we would also want to modify the node / ray intersection.
Reviewers: brecht, juicyfruit
Subscribers: dingto, ton
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D819
Previously offsets were calculated based on the BVH node size,
which is wrong and real PITA in cases when some extra data is
to be added into (or removed from) the node.
Now use offsets which are not calculated form the node size.
tri_shader does no longer need to a float.
Reviewers: dingto, sergey
Reviewed By: dingto, sergey
Subscribers: dingto
Projects: #cycles
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D789
Instead of pre-calculation and storage, we now calculate the face normal during render.
This gives a small slowdown (~1%) but decreases memory usage, which is especially important for GPUs,
where you have limited VRAM.
Part of my GSoC 2014.
This makes the code a bit easier to understand, and might come in handy
if we want to reuse more Embree code.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D482
Code by Brecht, with fixes by Lockal, Sergey and myself.
Old algorithm:
Raytrace from one transparent surface to the next step by step. To minimize
overhead in cases where we don't need transparent shadows, we first trace a
regular shadow ray. We check if the hit primitive was potentially transparent,
and only in that case start marching. this gives extra ray cast for the cases
were we do want transparency.
New algorithm:
We trace a single ray. If it hits any opaque surface, or more than a given
number of transparent surfaces is hit, then we consider the geometry to be
entirely blocked. If not, all transparent surfaces will be recorded and we
will shade them one by one to determine how much light is blocked. This all
happens in one scene intersection function.
Recording all hits works well in some cases but may be slower in others. If
we have many semi-transparent hairs, one intersection may be faster because
you'd be reinteresecting the same hairs a lot with each step otherwise. If
however there is mostly binary transparency then we may be recording many
unnecessary intersections when one of the first surfaces blocks all light.
We found that this helps quite nicely in some scenes, on koro.blend this can
give a 50% reduction in render time, on the pabellon barcelona scene and a
forest scene with transparent leaves it was 30%. Some other files rendered
maybe 1% or 2% slower, but this seems a reasonable tradeoff.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D473
