Basically the title says it all, volume stack initialization now is aware that
camera might be inside of the volume. This gives quite noticeable render time
regressions in cases camera is in the volume (didn't measure them yet) because
this requires quite a few of ray-casting per camera ray in order to check which
objects we're inside. Not quite sure if this might be optimized.
But the good thing is that we can do quite a good job on detecting whether
camera is outside of any of the volumes and in this case there should be no
time penalty at all (apart from some extra checks during the sync state).
For now we're only doing rather simple AABB checks between the viewplane and
volume objects. This could give some false-positives, but this should be good
starting point.
Need to mention panoramic cameras here, for them it's only check for whether
there are volumes in the scene, which would lead to speed regressions even if
the camera is outside of the volumes. Would need to figure out proper check
for such cameras.
There are still quite a few of TODOs in the code, but the patch is good enough
to start playing around with it checking whether there are some obvious mistakes
somewhere.
Currently the feature is only available in the Experimental feature sey, need
to solve some of the TODOs and look into making things faster before considering
the feature is ready for the official feature set. This would still likely
happen in current release cycle.
Reviewers: brecht, juicyfruit, dingto
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D794
Patch [#33445] - Experimental Cycles Hair Rendering (CPU only)
This patch allows hair data to be exported to cycles and introduces a new line segment primitive to render with.
The UI appears under the particle tab and there is a new hair info node available.
It is only available under the experimental feature set and for cpu rendering.
Now one no longer needs to match the sensor dimensions with the render dimensions manually.
IMPORTANT NOTE: if you were using AUTO before with mismathing sensor aspect ratio (comparing to the render dimensions)
this will change your render! We can doversion this, but apart from Tube project I don't know if anyone else
is using this yet (part due to this bug and the only recently fixed 3dview preview aspect ratio).
That should help more artists to take advantage of this fantastic Blender feature.
It still helps to know the parameters of kwnown cameras/lens though.
For example:
Nikon DX2S with a 10.5mm fisheye can be set with:
Render resolution: 4288 x 2848
Sensor 23.7 x 15.70 (15.70 can be ommitted if AUTO is used as fit method)
Note: some cameras render different sizes according to the recording mode.
For example, a Red Scarlet in 5k (@12 fps) can render a full circular fisheye with a sigma 4.5 lens.
The same camera in the 30fps recording mode renders 4k in a cropped circular image.
So it's not only the resolution that changes, but the actual sensor been used.
So just keep in mind that the more information you have from the camera/lens you want to emulate the better.
Bug found at/patch written as a follow up of the BlenderPRO2012, patch reviewed by Brecht Van Lommel
=== 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.
