With upcoming light group passes, for them to sum up correctly to the combined
pass the clamping must be more fine grained.
This also has the advantage that if one light is particularly noisy, it does
not diminish the contribution from other lights which do not need as much
clamping.
Clamp values on existing scenes will need to be tweaked to get similar results,
there is no automatic conversion possible which would give the same results as
before.
Implemented by Lukas, with tweaks by Brecht.
Part of D4837
This will be used by Optix to help the compiler figure out scoping. It is not
used by other devices currently, but worth testing if it helps there too.
Ref D5363
Use a single loop to iterate over all lights, reducing divergence and amount
of code to generate. Moving ray intersection calls out of conditionals will
also help the Optix compiler.
Ref D5363
This is done by storing only a subset of PathRadiance, and by storing
direct light immediately in the main PathRadiance. Saves about 10% of
CUDA stack memory, and simplifies subsurface indirect ray code.
Similar to what we did for area lights previously, this should help
preserve stratification when using multiple BSDFs in theory. Improvements
are not easily noticeable in practice though, because the number of BSDFs
is usually low. Still nice to eliminate one sampling dimension.
Previously the Sobol pattern suffered from some correlation issues that
made the outline of objects like a smoke domain visible. This helps
simplify the code and also makes some other optimizations possible.
Previously we used a 1D sequence to select a light, and another 2D sequence
to sample a point on the light. For multiple lights this meant each light
would get a random subset of a 2D stratified sequence, which is not
guaranteed to be stratified anymore.
Now we use only a 2D sequence, split into segments along the X axis, one for
each light. The samples that fall within a segment then each are a stratified
sequence, at least in the limit. So for example for two lights, we split up
the unit square into two segments [0,0.5[ x [0,1[ and [0.5,1[ x [0,1[.
This doesn't make much difference in most scenes, mainly helps if you have a
few large area lights or some types of HDR backgrounds.
Also pass by value and don't write back now that it is just a hash for seeding
and no longer an LCG state. Together this makes CUDA a tiny bit faster in my
tests, but mainly simplifies code.
This commit contains the first part of the new Cycles denoising option,
which filters the resulting image using information gathered during rendering
to get rid of noise while preserving visual features as well as possible.
To use the option, enable it in the render layer options. The default settings
fit a wide range of scenes, but the user can tweak individual settings to
control the tradeoff between a noise-free image, image details, and calculation
time.
Note that the denoiser may still change in the future and that some features
are not implemented yet. The most important missing feature is animation
denoising, which uses information from multiple frames at once to produce a
flicker-free and smoother result. These features will be added in the future.
Finally, thanks to all the people who supported this project:
- Google (through the GSoC) and Theory Studios for sponsoring the development
- The authors of the papers I used for implementing the denoiser (more details
on them will be included in the technical docs)
- The other Cycles devs for feedback on the code, especially Sergey for
mentoring the GSoC project and Brecht for the code review!
- And of course the users who helped with testing, reported bugs and things
that could and/or should work better!
Simplifies code quite a bit, making it shorter and easier to extend.
Currently no functional changes for users, but is required for the
upcoming work of shadow catcher support with OpenCL.
Decoupled ray marching is not supported yet.
Transparent shadows are always enabled for volume rendering.
Changes in kernel/bvh and kernel/geom are from Sergey.
This simiplifies code significantly, and prepares it for
record-all transparent shadow function in split kernel.
In scenes with many lights, some of them might have a very small contribution to some pixels, but the shadow rays are traced anyways.
To avoid that, this patch adds probabilistic termination to light samples - if the contribution before checking for shadowing is below a user-defined threshold, the sample will be discarded with probability (1 - (contribution / threshold)) and otherwise kept, but weighted more to remain unbiased.
This is the same approach that's also used in path termination based on length.
Note that the rendering remains unbiased with this option, it just adds a bit of noise - but if the setting is used moderately, the speedup gained easily outweighs the additional noise.
Reviewers: #cycles
Subscribers: sergey, brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2217
The light sampling functions calculate light sampling PDF for the case that the light has been randomly selected out of all lights.
However, since BPT handles lamps and meshlights separately, this isn't the case. So, to avoid a wrong result, the code just included the 0.5 factor in the throughput.
In theory, however, the correction should be made to the sampling probability, which needs to be doubled. Now, for the regular calculation, that's no real difference since the throughput is divided by the pdf.
However, it does matter for the MIS calculation - it's unbiased both ways, but including the factor in the PDF instead of the throughput should give slightly better results.
Reviewers: sergey, brecht, dingto, juicyfruit
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2258
Both spot and area light have large areas where they're not visible.
Therefore, this patch stops the light sampling code when one of these cases (outside of the spotlight cone or behind the area light) occurs, before the lamp shader is evaluated.
In the case of the area light, the solid angle sampling can also be skipped.
In a test scene with Sample All Lights and 18 Area lamps and 9 Spot lamps that all point away from the area that the camera sees, render time drops from 12sec to 5sec.
Reviewers: brecht, sergey, dingto, juicyfruit
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2216
All the changes are mainly giving explicit tips on inlining functions,
so they match how inlining worked with previous toolkit.
This make kernel compiled by CUDA 8 render in average with same speed
as previous kernels. Some scenes are somewhat faster, some of them are
somewhat slower. But slowdown is within 1% so far.
On a positive side it allows us to enable newer generation cards on
buildbots (so GTX 10x0 will be officially supported soon).
This commit changes the way how we pass bounce information to the Light
Path node. Instead of manualy copying the bounces into ShaderData, we now
directly pass PathState. This reduces the arguments that we need to pass
around and also makes it easier to extend the feature.
This commit also exposes the Transmission Bounce Depth to the Light Path
node. It works similar to the Transparent Depth Output: Replace a
Transmission lightpath after X bounces with another shader, e.g a Diffuse
one. This can be used to avoid black surfaces, due to low amount of max
bounces.
Reviewed by Sergey and Brecht, thanks for some hlp with this.
I tested compilation and usage on CPU (SVM and OSL), CUDA, OpenCL Split
and Mega kernel. Hopefully this covers all devices. :)
This is so-called GPU limitation boundary hit, told compiler to NOT include
volume bound function, otherwise some real weird things used to happen.
We actually might want to do the same for CPU, inlining everything is not
the way to get fastest code.
* __VOLUME__ is basic volume support with Emission and Absorption.
* __VOLUME_SCATTER__ enables volume Scattering support.
* __VOLUME_DECOUPLED__ enables Decoupled Ray Marching.
* CUDA can be compiled with Volume support again, change line 78 kernel_types.h for that.
Volumes are still fragile on GPU though, got some Memory/Address CUDA errors in tests.. needs to be investigated more deeply.
* Volume multiple importace sampling support to combine equiangular and distance
sampling, for both homogeneous and heterogeneous volumes.
* Branched path "Sample All Direct Lights" and "Sample All Indirect Lights" now
apply to volumes as well as surfaces.
Implementation note:
For simplicity this is all done with decoupled ray marching, the only case we do
not use decoupled is for distance only sampling with one light sample. The
homogeneous case should still compile on the GPU because it only requires fixed
size storage, but the heterogeneous case will be trickier to get working.
