multiple importance sampling, so you can disable them for diffuse/glossy/transmission.
The Light Path node here is still weak and does not give this info. To make that
work we'd need to evaluate the shader multiple times which is slow and we can't
detect well enough when it is actually needed.
direct and indirect lighting differently. Rather than picking one light for each
point on the path, it now loops over all lights for direct lighting. For indirect
lighting it still picks a random light each time.
It gives control over the number of AA samples, and the number of Diffuse, Glossy,
Transmission, AO, Mesh Light, Background and Lamp samples for each AA sample.
This helps tuning render performance/noise and tends to give less noise for renders
dominated by direct lighting.
This sampling mode only works on the CPU, and still needs proper tile rendering
to show progress (will follow tommorrow or so), because each AA sample can be quite
slow now and so the delay between each update wil be too long.
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!
