This can for example be useful if you want to manually terminate the path at
some point and use a color other than black.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D454
This now uses decoupled ray marching, and removes the probalistic scattering.
What this means is that each AA sample will be slower but contain less noise,
hopefully giving less render time to reach the same noise levels.
For those following along, there's still a bunch of volume sampling improvements
to do: all-light sampling, multiple importance sampling, transmittance threshold,
better indirect light handling, multiple scatter approximation.
Similar to surfaces, this will now always scatter rather than probabilistically
scattering or not depending on the transmittance.
This also makes calculation of branched path throughput non-probalistic, which
makes thing slower too. That's to be solved by decoupled ray marching later.
This adds a new option "Sample All Lights" to the Sampling panel in Cycles (Branched Path). When enabled, Cycles will sample all the lights in the scene for the indirect samples, instead of randomly picking one. This is already happening for direct samples, now you can optionally enable it for indirect.
Example file and renders:
Blend file: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/27411
Random: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=68033
All: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=68034
Sampling all lights is a bit slower, but there is less variance, so it should help in situations with many lights.
Patch by myself with some tweaks by Brecht.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D391
Indirect and Direct samples can now be clamped individually. This way we can clamp the indirect samples (fireflies), while keeping the direct highlights.
Example render: http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=66586
WARNING: This breaks backwards compatibility. If you had Clamping enabled in an old file, you must re-enable either Direct/Indirect clamping or both again.
Reviewed by: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D303
Z, Index, normal, UV and vector passes are only affected by surfaces with alpha
transparency equal to or higher than this threshold. With value 0.0 the first
surface hit will always write to these passes, regardless of transparency. With
higher values surfaces that are mostly transparent can be skipped until an opaque
surface is encountered.
This is done by adding a Volume Scatter node. In many cases you will want to
add together a Volume Absorption and Volume Scatter node with the same color
and density to get the expected results.
This should work with branched path tracing, mixing closures, overlapping
volumes, etc. However there's still various optimizations needed for sampling.
The main missing thing from the volume branch is the equiangular sampling for
homogeneous volumes.
The heterogeneous scattering code was arranged such that we can use a single
stratified random number for distance sampling, which gives less noise than
pseudo random numbers for each step. For volumes where the color is textured
there still seems to be something off, needs to be investigated.
Volumes can now have textured colors and density. There is a Volume Sampling
panel in the Render properties with these settings:
* Step size: distance between volume shader samples when rendering the volume.
Lower values give more accurate and detailed results but also increased render
time.
* Max steps: maximum number of steps through the volume before giving up, to
protect from extremely long render times with big objects or small step sizes.
This is much more compute intensive than homogeneous volume, so when you are not
using a texture you should enable the Homogeneous Volume option in the material
or world for faster rendering.
One important missing feature is that Generated texture coordinates are not yet
working in volumes, and they are the default coordinates for nearly all texture
nodes. So until that works you need to plug in object texture coordinates or a
world space position.
This is work by "storm", Stuart Broadfoot, Thomas Dinges and myself.
This is done using the existing Emission node and closure (we may add a volume
emission node, not clear yet if it will be needed).
Volume emission only supports indirect light sampling which means it's not very
efficient to make small or far away bright light sources. Using direct light
sampling and MIS would be tricky and probably won't be added anytime soon. Other
renderers don't support this either as far as I know, lamps and ray visibility
tricks may be used instead.
This works pretty much as you would expect, overlapping volume objects gives
a more dense volume. What did change is that world volume shaders are now
active everywhere, they are no longer excluded inside objects.
This may not be desirable and we need to think of better control over this.
In some cases you clearly want it to happen, for example if you are rendering
a fire in a foggy environment. In other cases like the inside of a house you
may not want any fog, but it doesn't seem possible in general for the renderer
to automatically determine what is inside or outside of the house.
This is implemented using a simple fixed size array of shader/object ID pairs,
limited to max 15 overlapping objects. The closures from all shaders are put
into a single closure array, exactly the same as if an add shader was used to
combine them.
This is the simplest possible volume rendering case, constant density inside
the volume and no scattering or emission. My plan is to tweak, verify and commit
more volume rendering effects one by one, doing it all at once makes it
difficult to verify correctness and track down bugs.
Documentation is here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Materials/Volume
Currently this hooks into path tracing in 3 ways, which should get us pretty
far until we add more advanced light sampling. These 3 hooks are repeated in
the path tracing, branched path tracing and transparent shadow code:
* Determine active volume shader at start of the path
* Change active volume shader on transmission through a surface
* Light attenuation over line segments between camera, surfaces and background
This is work by "storm", Stuart Broadfoot, Thomas Dinges and myself.
This to avoids build conflicts with libc++ on FreeBSD, these __ prefixed values
are reserved for compilers. I apologize to anyone who has patches or branches
and has to go through the pain of merging this change, it may be easiest to do
these same replacements in your code and then apply/merge the patch.
Ref T37477.
* Remove the compatible falloff SSS implementation. We shouldn't support two implementations in the long term, and 2.7x is a good release number do break some compatibility as well.
* Version patch added, so Files with Compatible falloff will automatically use Cubic now.
It was already mentioned in the manual, that Compatible is deprecated.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/Shaders#BSSRDF
* Avoid special code, when Subsurface is enabled.
Ideally we should only use the function, and get rid of the extra duplicate, but this is slower on CUDA.
New features:
* Bump mapping now works with SSS
* Texture Blur factor for SSS, see the documentation for details:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/Shaders#Subsurface_Scattering
Work in progress for feedback:
Initial implementation of the "BSSRDF Importance Sampling" paper, which uses
a different importance sampling method. It gives better quality results in
many ways, with the availability of both Cubic and Gaussian falloff functions,
but also tends to be more noisy when using the progressive integrator and does
not give great results with some geometry. It works quite well for the
non-progressive integrator and is often less noisy there.
This code may still change a lot, so unless you're testing it may be best to
stick to the Compatible falloff function.
Skin test render and file that takes advantage of the gaussian falloff:
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=57661http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=57662http://www.pasteall.org/blend/23501
* GPU kernel can now be compiled without __NON_PROGRESSIVE__ again, was broken after my last commit. Also add a check for have_error(), in case the GPU kernel comes without Non-Progressive, to avoid a crash.
* Don't compile progressive kernel twice on CPU, if __NON_PROGRESSIVE__ would be disabled there.
* Non-Progressive integrator is now available on the GPU (CUDA, sm_20 and above).
Implementation details:
* kernel_path_trace() has been split up into two functions:
kernel_path_trace_non_progressive() and kernel_path_trace_progressive().
* We compile two CUDA kernel entry functions (in kernel.cu) for the two integrators, they are still inside one .cubin file but due to the kernel separation there should be no performance problem. I tested with the BMW file on my Geforce 540M and the render times were the same for 100 samples (1.57 min in my case).
This is part of my GSoC project, SVN merge of r59032 + manual merge of UI changes for this from my branch.
* Render Passes are now available for Subsurface Scattering (Direct, Indirect and Color pass).
This is part of my GSoC project, SVN merge of r58587, r58828 and r58835.
* Added a Ray Depth output to the Light Path node, which gives the user access to the current bounce.
This can be used to limit the maximum ray bounce on a per shader basis. Another use case is to restrict light influence with this, to have a lamp only contribute to the direct lighting.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/More#Light_Path
This is part of my GSoC 2013 project. SVN merge of r58091 and r58772 from soc-2013-dingto.
* Avoid check for !LABEL_TRANSPARENT in "kernel_path_non_progressive_lighting", transparency is either handled in the outer loop or in the "kernel_path_indirect" function, but not here.
and sm_30 cards, so hopefully it should all work now.
Also includes some warnings fixes related to nvcc compiler arguments, should make
no difference otherwise.
instead of sobol. So far one doesn't seem to be consistently better or worse than
the other for the same number of samples but more testing is needed.
The random number generator itself is slower than sobol for most number of samples,
except 16, 64, 256, .. because they can be computed faster. This can probably be
optimized, but we can do that when/if this actually turns out to be useful.
Paper this implementation is based on:
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/MultiJitteredSampling/
Also includes some refactoring of RNG code, fixing a Sobol correlation issue with
the first BSDF and < 16 samples, skipping some unneeded RNG calls and using a
simpler unit square to unit disk function.
* Revert r57203 (len() renaming)
There seems to be a problem with nVidia OpenCL after this and I haven't figured out the real cause yet.
Better to selectively enable native length() later, after figuring out what's wrong.
This fixes [#35612].
* Rename some math functions:
len -> length
len_squared -> length_squared
normalize_len -> normalize_length
* This way OpenCL uses its inbuilt length() function, rather than our own. The other two functions have been renamed for consistency.
* Tested CPU, CUDA and OpenCL compile, should be no functional changes.
