The issue was an out-of-bounds read access when checking whether
the world volume emission needs to be accumulated.
Solution is to check for this case. Done in the generic place, so
that the shade_volume kernel is more readable and no branching
added there, and there is no impact on scenes without the light
linking.
Assume that the world emissive volume belongs to the default light
linking group, as there is no way to link it explicitly to anything.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/110733
Using area-preserving mapping from cone to disk. Has somewhat distortion
near 90°.
The texture rotates with the transformation of the light object, can
have negative and non-uniform scaling.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/109842
The spotlight is now treated as a sphere instead of a view-aligned disk.
The implementation remains almost identical to that of a point light,
except for the spotlight attenuation and spot blend. There is no
attenuation inside the sphere. Ref #108505
Other changes include:
## Sampling
Instead of sampling the disk area, the new implementation samples either
the cone of the visible portion on the sphere or the spread cone, based
on which cone has a smaller solid angle. This reduces noise when the
spotlight has a large radius and a small spread angle.
| Before | After |
| -- | -- |
||
## Texture
Spot light can now project texture using UV coordinates.
<video src="/attachments/6db989d2-7a3c-4b41-9340-f5690d48c4fb"
title="spot_light_texture.mp4" controls></video>
## Normalization
Previously, the normalization factor for the spotlight was \(\pi r^2\),
the area of a disk. This factor has been adjusted to \(4\pi r^2\) to
account for the surface area of a sphere. This change also affects point
light since they share the same kernel type.
## Versioning
Some pipeline uses the `Normal` socket of the Texture Coordinate node for
projection, because `ls->Ng` was set to the incoming direction at the
current shading point. Now that `ls->Ng` corresponds to the normal
direction of a point on the sphere (except when the radius is zero),
we replace these nodes with a combination of the Geometry shader node
and the Vector Transform node, which gives the same result as before.
Example file see https://archive.blender.org/developer/T93676
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/109329
for energy preservation and better compatibility with other renderes. Ref: #108505
Point light now behaves the same as a spherical mesh light with the same overall energy (scaling from emission strength to power is \(4\pi^2R^2\)).
# Cycles
## Comparison
| Mesh Light | This patch | Previous behavior |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
|  |  |  |
The behavior stays the same when `radius = 0`.
| This patch | Previous behavior |
| -------- | -------- |
|  |  |
No obvious performance change observed.
## Sampling
When shading point lies outside the sphere, sample the spanned solid angle uniformly.
When shading point lies inside the sphere, sample spherical direction uniformly when inside volume or the surface is transmissive, otherwise sample cosine-weighted upper hemisphere.
## Light Tree
When shading point lies outside the sphere, treat as a disk light spanning the same solid angle.
When shading point lies inside the sphere, it behaves like a background light, with estimated outgoing radiance
\[L_o=\int f_aL_i\cos\theta_i\mathrm{d}\omega_i=\int f_a\frac{E}{\pi r^2}\cos\theta_i\mathrm{d}\omega_i\approx f_a \frac{E}{r^2}\],
with \(f_a\) being the BSDF and \(E\) `measure.energy` in `light_tree.cpp`.
The importance calculation for `LIGHT_POINT` is
\[L_o=f_a E\cos\theta_i\frac{\cos\theta}{d^2}\].
Consider `min_importance = 0` because maximal incidence angle is \(\pi\), we could substitute \(d^2\) with \(\frac{r^2}{2}\) so the averaged outgoing radiance is \(f_a \frac{E}{r^2}\).
This only holds for non-transmissive surface, but should be fine to use in volume.
# EEVEE
When shading point lies outside the sphere, the sphere light is equivalent to a disk light spanning the same solid angle. The sine of the new half-angle is the tangent of the previous half-angle.
When shading point lies inside the sphere, integrating over the cosine-weighted hemisphere gives 1.0.
## Comparison with Cycles
The plane is diffuse, the blue sphere has specular component.
| Before | |After ||
|---|--|--|--|
|Cycles|EEVEE|Cycles|EEVEE|
|||||
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/108506
The original names were `...update_position()`, but no update in
position is performed in these functions, rather, the entries in
`LightSample` are updated. Also make clear that the functions are used
by MNEE.
The light tree itself is disabled on the AMD GPUs due to a compiler issue.
There are couple of places where this was not fully checked:
- The `light_sample` function in the kernel.
- The light threshold during synchronization
The former one is solved as easy as just adding an ifdef block.
The latter one is solved by delaying the threshold assignment for
later on.
Pull Request #105022
There has been an attempt to reorganize this part, however, it seems that didn't compile on HIP, and is reverted in
rBc2dc65dfa4ae60fa5d2c3b0cfe86f99dcb5bf16f. This is another attempt of refactoring. as I have no idea why some things don't work on HIP, it's
best to check whether this compiles on other platforms.
The main changes are creating a new struct named `MeshLight` that is shared between `KernelLightDistribution` and `KernelLightTreeEmitter`,
and a bit of renaming, so that light sampling with or without light tree could call the same function.
Also, I noticed a patch D16714 referring to HIP compilation error. Not sure if it's related, but browsing
https://builder.blender.org/admin/#/builders/30/builds/7826/steps/7/logs/stdio, it didn't work on gfx1102, not gfx9*.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16722
* Split light types into own files, move light type specific code from
light tree and MNEE.
* Move flat light distribution code into own kernel file and host side
building function, in preparation of light tree addition. Add light/sample.h
as main entry point to kernel light sampling.
* Better separate calculation of pdf for selecting a light, and pdf for
sampling a point on the light. The selection pdf is now also stored in
LightSampling for MNEE to correctly recalculate the full pdf when the
shading position changes but the point on the light remains fixed.
* Improvement to kernel light storage, using packed_float3, better variable
names, etc.
Includes contributions by Brecht Van Lommel and Weizhen Huang.
Ref T77889
For transparency, volume and light intersection rays, adjust these distances
rather than the ray start position. This way we increment the start distance
by the smallest possible float increment to avoid self intersections, and be
sure it works as the distance compared to be will be exactly the same as
before, due to the ray start position and direction remaining the same.
Fix T98764, T96537, hair ray tracing precision issues.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15455
* Rename "texture" to "data array". This has not used textures for a long time,
there are just global memory arrays now. (On old CUDA GPUs there was a cache
for textures but not global memory, so we used to put all data in textures.)
* For CUDA and HIP, put globals in KernelParams struct like other devices.
* Drop __ prefix for data array names, no possibility for naming conflict now that
these are in a struct.
Light groups are a type of pass that only contains lighting from a subset of light sources.
They are created in the View layer, and light sources (lamps, objects with emissive materials
and/or the environment) can be assigned to a group.
Currently, each light group ends up generating its own version of the Combined pass.
In the future, additional types of passes (e.g. shadowcatcher) might be getting their own
per-lightgroup versions.
The lightgroup creation and assignment is not Cycles-specific, so Eevee or external render
engines could make use of it in the future.
Note that Lightgroups are identified by their name - therefore, the name of the Lightgroup
in the View Layer and the name that's set in an object's settings must match for it to be
included.
Currently, changing a Lightgroup's name does not update objects - this is planned for the
future, along with other features such as denoising for light groups and viewing them in
preview renders.
Original patch by Alex Fuller (@mistaed), with some polishing by Lukas Stockner (@lukasstockner97).
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12871
This adds support for selective rendering of caustics in shadows of refractive
objects. Example uses are rendering of underwater caustics and eye caustics.
This is based on "Manifold Next Event Estimation", a method developed for
production rendering. The idea is to selectively enable shadow caustics on a
few objects in the scene where they have a big visual impact, without impacting
render performance for the rest of the scene.
The Shadow Caustic option must be manually enabled on light, caustic receiver
and caster objects. For such light paths, the Filter Glossy option will be
ignored and replaced by sharp caustics.
Currently this method has a various limitations:
* Only caustics in shadows of refractive objects work, which means no caustics
from reflection or caustics that outside shadows. Only up to 4 refractive
caustic bounces are supported.
* Caustic caster objects should have smooth normals.
* Not currently support for Metal GPU rendering.
In the future this method may be extended for more general caustics.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
This code adds manifold next event estimation through refractive surface(s) as a
new sampling technique for direct lighting, i.e. finding the point on the
refractive surface(s) along the path to a light sample, which satisfies Fermat's
principle for a given microfacet normal and the path's end points. This
technique involves walking on the "specular manifold" using a pseudo newton
solver. Such a manifold is defined by the specular constraint matrix from the
manifold exploration framework [2]. For each refractive interface, this
constraint is defined by enforcing that the generalized half-vector projection
onto the interface local tangent plane is null. The newton solver guides the
walk by linearizing the manifold locally before reprojecting the linear solution
onto the refractive surface. See paper [1] for more details about the technique
itself and [3] for the half-vector light transport formulation, from which it is
derived.
[1] Manifold Next Event Estimation
Johannes Hanika, Marc Droske, and Luca Fascione. 2015.
Comput. Graph. Forum 34, 4 (July 2015), 87–97.
https://jo.dreggn.org/home/2015_mnee.pdf
[2] Manifold exploration: a Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique for rendering
scenes with difficult specular transport Wenzel Jakob and Steve Marschner.
2012. ACM Trans. Graph. 31, 4, Article 58 (July 2012), 13 pages.
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/manifolds-sg12/
[3] The Natural-Constraint Representation of the Path Space for Efficient
Light Transport Simulation. Anton S. Kaplanyan, Johannes Hanika, and Carsten
Dachsbacher. 2014. ACM Trans. Graph. 33, 4, Article 102 (July 2014), 13 pages.
https://cg.ivd.kit.edu/english/HSLT.php
The code for this samping technique was inserted at the light sampling stage
(direct lighting). If the walk is successful, it turns off path regularization
using a specialized flag in the path state (PATH_MNEE_SUCCESS). This flag tells
the integrator not to blur the brdf roughness further down the path (in a child
ray created from BSDF sampling). In addition, using a cascading mechanism of
flag values, we cull connections to caustic lights for this and children rays,
which should be resolved through MNEE.
This mechanism also cancels the MIS bsdf counter part at the casutic receiver
depth, in essence leaving MNEE as the only sampling technique from receivers
through refractive casters to caustic lights. This choice might not be optimal
when the light gets large wrt to the receiver, though this is usually not when
you want to use MNEE.
This connection culling strategy removes a fair amount of fireflies, at the cost
of introducing a slight bias. Because of the selective nature of the culling
mechanism, reflective caustics still benefit from the native path
regularization, which further removes fireflies on other surfaces (bouncing
light off casters).
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13533
* Replace license text in headers with SPDX identifiers.
* Remove specific license info from outdated readme.txt, instead leave details
to the source files.
* Add list of SPDX license identifiers used, and corresponding license texts.
* Update copyright dates while we're at it.
Ref D14069, T95597
This patch reverts the normal behavior of the spotlights. In the last fix,
the returned normal of a spot light was equal to its direction. This broke
some texturing methods used by artists.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13991
* Spot lights are now handled as disks aligned with the direction of the
spotlight instead of view aligned disks.
* Point light is now handled separately from the spot light, to fix a case
where multiple lights are intersected in a row. Before the origin of the
ray was the previously intersected light and not the origin of the initial
ray traced from the last surface/volume interaction.
This makes both strategies in multiple importance sampling converge to the same
result. It changes the render results in some scenes, for example the junkshop
scene where there are large point lights overlapping scene geometry and each
other.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13233
BVH2 triangle intersection was broken on the GPU since packed floats can't
be loaded directly into SSE. The better long term solution for performance
would be to build a BVH2 for GPU and Embree for CPU, similar to what we do
for OptiX.
Remove prefix of filenames that is the same as the folder name. This used
to help when #includes were using individual files, but now they are always
relative to the cycles root directory and so the prefixes are redundant.
For patches and branches, git merge and rebase should be able to detect the
renames and move over code to the right file.
* Split render/ into scene/ and session/. The scene/ folder now contains the
scene and its nodes. The session/ folder contains the render session and
associated data structures like drivers and render buffers.
* Move top level kernel headers into new folders kernel/camera/, kernel/film/,
kernel/light/, kernel/sample/, kernel/util/
* Move integrator related kernel headers into kernel/integrator/
* Move OSL shaders from kernel/shaders/ to kernel/osl/shaders/
For patches and branches, git merge and rebase should be able to detect the
renames and move over code to the right file.
