This includes much improved GPU rendering performance, viewport interactivity,
new shadow catcher, revamped sampling settings, subsurface scattering anisotropy,
new GPU volume sampling, improved PMJ sampling pattern, and more.
Some features have also been removed or changed, breaking backwards compatibility.
Including the removal of the OpenCL backend, for which alternatives are under
development.
Release notes and code docs:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.0/Cycleshttps://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source/Render/Cycles
Credits:
* Sergey Sharybin
* Brecht Van Lommel
* Patrick Mours (OptiX backend)
* Christophe Hery (subsurface scattering anisotropy)
* William Leeson (PMJ sampling pattern)
* Alaska (various fixes and tweaks)
* Thomas Dinges (various fixes)
For the full commit history, see the cycles-x branch. This squashes together
all the changes since intermediate changes would often fail building or tests.
Ref T87839, T87837, T87836
Fixes T90734, T89353, T80267, T80267, T77185, T69800
This feature takes some inspiration from
"RenderMan: An Advanced Path Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering" and
"A Hierarchical Automatic Stopping Condition for Monte Carlo Global Illumination"
The basic principle is as follows:
While samples are being added to a pixel, the adaptive sampler writes half
of the samples to a separate buffer. This gives it two separate estimates
of the same pixel, and by comparing their difference it estimates convergence.
Once convergence drops below a given threshold, the pixel is considered done.
When a pixel has not converged yet and needs more samples than the minimum,
its immediate neighbors are also set to take more samples. This is done in order
to more reliably detect sharp features such as caustics. A 3x3 box filter that
is run periodically over the tile buffer is used for that purpose.
After a tile has finished rendering, the values of all passes are scaled as if
they were rendered with the full number of samples. This way, any code operating
on these buffers, for example the denoiser, does not need to be changed for
per-pixel sample counts.
Reviewed By: brecht, #cycles
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D4686
