Problem: artist wants character to walk in grass, but still have all rendered
in seperate render-layers, for postpro effects and vblur. How to efficiently
create a mask image you can put *over* the character for the grass?
Solution has two parts; this commits allows any layer inside of the renderlayers
to become a Z-mask (Z values for solid gets filled in, but not rendered).
Second part of commit is render option "Only render stuff that's in front of
a zbuffer value that was filled in (saves render time)
Also, duplis are now taking into account, the proper way to exclude
them is to set the material to be not traceable.
Removed an unnecessary pointer from the VlakRen struct to save some
memory, not really that significant, but still, saves 70 mb for 10
million faces.
- non OSA case didn't work
- ztransp adding was accidentally using an incorrect alpha value
NOTE: allmost all pass types rendered in OSA with a filter (not box!) were
incorrectly added on solid layers. Like diffuse, AO, etc.
This is actually just the alpha value as currently being calculated
by the mist code. It is in many cases not very useful to have this as
alpha in shading result, also for postprocess and composite.
Note: this pass also works with "Mist" not set in World, of course.
=============================
A new approximate ambient occlusion method has been added, next to the
existing one based on raytracing. This method is specifically targetted
at use in animations, since it is inherently noise free, and so will
not flicker across frames.
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/approximate-ambient-occlusion/http://peach.blender.org/index.php/approximate-ambient-occlusion/
Further improvements are still needed, but it can be tested already. There
are still a number of known issues:
- Bias errors on backfaces.
- For performance, instanced object do not occlude currently.
- Sky textures don't work well, the derivatives for texture evaluation
are not correct.
- Multiple passes do not work entirely correct (they are not accurate
to begin with, but could be better).
[#6861] Black dots when using small lamps on Mirror materials in 2.44 and 2.43.
some values were not initialized properly, for example, the window coordinates for reflections, this caused NAN color values for some pixels, (may also fix plumiferos bad pixel problem from last bconf)
* Most were uninitialised vars
* Fixed whitespace in a few places
* The change I made in rendercore.c -> do_bake_shade() was for an uninitialised var, but I hope it does't cause any rendering errors...
===============================
- One shadowbuffer per thread.
- Added more break tests in shadow buffer code.
- Removed R.clipcrop global, solution is not nice yet, but at
least threadsafe.
- Fixed bug in strand render shadow buffer code.
=================
Big commit, but little user visible changes.
- Dupliverts and duplifaces are now rendered as instances, instead
of storing all of the geometry for each dupli, now an instance is
created with a matrix transform refering to the source object.
This should allow us to render tree leaves more memory efficient.
- Radiosity and to some degree raytracing of such objects is not
really efficient still. For radiosity this is fundamentally hard
to solve, but raytracing an octree could be created for each object,
but the current octree code with it's fixed size doesn't allow this
efficiently.
- The regression tests survived, but with I expect that some bugs will
pop up .. hopefully not too many :).
Implementation Notes
====================
- Dupligroups and linked meshes are not rendered as instances yet,
since they can in fact be different due to various reasons,
instancing of these types of duplis that are the same can be added
for them at a later point.
- Each ObjectRen now stores it's own database, instead of there being
one big databases of faces, verts, .. . Which objects that are actually
rendered are defined by the list of ObjectRenInstances, which all refer
to an ObjectRen.
- Homogeneous coordinatess and clipping is now not stored in vertices
anymore, but instead computed on the fly. This couldn't work for
instances. That does mean some extra computation has to be done, but
memory lookups can be slow too, and this saves some memory. Overall
I didn't find a significant speed impact.
- OSA rendering for solid and ztransp now is different. Instead of e.g.
going 8 times over the databases times and rendering the z-buffer, it
now goes over the database once and renders each polygon 8 times. That
was necessary to keep instances efficient, and can also give some
performance improvement without instances.
- There was already instancing support in the yafray export code, now it
uses Blender's render instances for export.
- UV and color layer storage in the render was a bit messy before, now
should be easier to understand.
- convertblender.c was reorganized somewhat. Regular render, speedvector
and baking now use a single function to create the database, previously
there was code duplicated for it.
- Some of these changes were done with future multithreading of scene
and shadow buffer creation in mind, though especially for scene creation
much work remains to be done to make it threadsafe, since it also involves
a lot of code from blenkernel, and there is an ugly conflict with the way
dupli groups work here .. though in the render code itself it's almost there.
=========
- Fix crash in particle transform with the particle system not editable.
- Particle child distribution and caching is now multithreaded.
- Child particles now have a separate Render Amount next to the existing
Amount. The render amount particles are now only distributed and cached
at render time, which should make editing with child particles faster.
- Two new options for diffuse strand shading:
- Surface Diffuse: computes the strand normal taking the normal at
the surface into account.
- Blending Distance: the distance in Blender units over which to
blend in the normal at the surface.
- Special strand rendering for more memory efficient and faster hair and
grass. This is a work in progress, and has a number of known issues,
don't report bugs to me for this feature yet.
More info:
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/particles/
=============
A new "Selected to Active" option in the Bake panel, to (typically) bake
a high poly object onto a low poly object. Code based on patch #7339 by
Frank Richter (Crystal Space developer), thanks!.
Normal Mapping
==============
Camera, World, Object and Tangent space is now supported for baking, and
for material textures. The "NMap TS" setting is replaced with a dropdown
of the four choices in the image texture buttons.
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/render-baking/
- Multilayer EXR files:
Rendering without "do composite" skipped to render the vector pass
- Also found a wrong loop, missing to clear speed vectors in the first
pixel of a tile, causing error print:
"Found uninitialized speed in vector buffer... fixed"
leads to flickering, and a bug that would display parts of the
preview render as black for interrupted preview renders.
(sorry for the late fix, i've triple checked the code ..)
- Radius R, G, B sliders had too small number increase on clicking.
- Preview render now renders with higher SSS error setting to speed it up a
bit.
- bug #6664: 3d preview render had artifacts. re->viewdx/dy wasn't set then,
which is needed to estimate the area of each point. Have set this now, not
in the nicest way, there is some bit duplicated code, but I don't want to
refactor existing code with the chance of breaking it at this point.
- bug #6665: grid like artifacts with parts rendering. The two extra pixels
around parts used for filtering were used as well, leading to double points.
- Bug #6652: SSS artifacts with ray shadow.
- Bug #6643: AO + SSS crash. couldn't redo this crash myself, but did find a
bug that may cause a crash, please test.
- Tweak backscattering to avoid thin surfaces rendering too dark.
Render: Vector blur didn't work proper for Ztransp (accidentally was
antialising speed, which should not happen).
Also added speed-pass clearing in render, this to elimate the 'tsk tsk'
print in the Vector Blur node. :)
<sob>the 'time cursor' for bake-render has to go... it is being called
inside of a thread (even whilst thread is mutex locked), but that's not
supported in X11. It might be even instable in OSX/Windows even...
Only way to bring it back is to have the main loop (not in thread) update
the time cursor like each second. Would still mean to add a counter var...
will think it over. First want to have confirmed this is stable.
UV rendering error: the third value of a UV texture coordinate should be
set to zero always, this enables 3d textures to work uniform with UV.
Also fixed: UV pass output for non_OSA is now equal to OSA, meaning only
used UV face values are in such passes.
(Empty space will get OSA options, that I add tomorrow or so)
- Removed a lot of old unused variables in renderdata. Also meant I had
to remove this from python API... please check if this gives valid
scripts?
- Cleaned up bad formatted code for FFMPG buttons (spaces instead of tabs)
Ztransp Mask issue: now I did all this work to solve the exceptions, but
forgot the most simple case: regular alpha-over :)
This solves for example AA issues in ztransp-hair over solid faces.
Added support for multiple UVs in the render engine. This also involved
changing the way faces are stored, to allow data to be added optionally
per 256 faces, same as the existing system for vertices.
A UV layer can be specified in the Map Input panel and the Geometry node
by name. Leaving this field blank will default to the active UV layer.
Also added sharing of face selection and hiding between UV layers, and at
the same time improved syncing with editmode selection and hiding.
Still to do:
- Multi UV support for fastshade.
- Multires and NMesh preservation of multiple UV sets.
Please read:
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Imaging.834.0.html
Or in short:
- adding MultiLayer Image support
- recoded entire Image API
- better integration of movie/sequence Images
Was a whole load of work... went down for a week to do this. So, will need
a lot of testing! Will be in irc all evening.
- New Passes: UV and Rad(iosity)
- New Nodes: UV Map and Index Mask
- Z-combine now is antialiased
As usual, please check the log. Has nice pics!
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Composite__UV_Map__ID.830.0.html
For devs: the antialias code from Vector Blur is now exported in compo
too. Works pretty good. Even fixed a bug in antialias, so vectorblur
will be better.
Also: found out that OpenGL display list speedup accidentally was still
triggered with the rt button... so it did not work by default.
- Bug: material emit was ignored (showed in preview render backdrop)
- Bug: world exposure was ignored
- Bug: lamp halo was ignoring 'render layer light override'.
Further reshuffled the way shadows are being pre-calculated, this to enable
more advanced (and faster) usage of Material lightgroups. Now shadows are
being cached in lamps, using a per-sample counter to check if a recalc is
needed. Will also work (later) for Raytracing node shaders.
- New: Material LightGroup option "Always", which always shades the lights
in the group, independent of visibility layer. (so it allows to move such
lights to hidden layer, not influencing anything).
Full log:
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Render_Passes.829.0.html
In short:
- Passes now have option to be excluded from "Combined".
- RenderLayers allow to override Light (Lamp groups) or Material.
- RenderLayers and Passes are in Outliner now, (ab)using Matt's nice
'restriction collumns'. :)
Removed all limitations from render code for maximum threads. The only
define for this now is in BLI_threads.h, and currently set to 8.
Note that each thread renders an entire tile, and also allocates the
buffers for the tiles, so; more threads might work better with smaller
tiles.
IMPORTANT: node system won't work yet with more than 2 threads! So, don't
try material nodes or compositing with over 2 threads. That I'll commit
later today.
What does work (should work :) is AO and soft shadow now.
- Now baking itself is threaded too (like for render, max 2 cpus. Moving
this to 4 cpus is on todo. Goes twice as fast!
- fix: ESC from bake was broken...
- other fix: toolbox menus didn't treat sublevel string lengths OK,
truncating items like for Group library names.
Bake-render:
Quad faces still didn't get handled properly, error visible for vertex
color or UV textures.
Also: added error meny when a Bake cannot work because there are no Images
or no Images with buffers
Random seeding is still not perfect in render, especially lack of good
thread support still.
- VectorBlur node was calling seed for each exec, causing other nodes to
get fixed random too.
- added seed in non-OSA main loop for render
- use BLI_srandom, is better than BLI_srand
3D window, preview panel, didn't give correct specular for Ortho.
The view-vector was flipped negative then, so more view-depending
code (like tracing) would go wrong then.
All data layers, including MVert/MEdge/MFace, are now managed as custom
data layers. The pointers like Mesh.mvert, Mesh.dvert or Mesh.mcol are
still used of course, but allocating, copying or freeing these arrays
should be done through the CustomData API.
Work in progress documentation on this is here:
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/BlenderArchitecture/CustomData
Replaced TFace by MTFace:
This is the same struct, except that it does not contain color, that now
always stays separated in MCol. This was not a good design decision to
begin with, and it is needed for adding multiple color layers later. Note
that this does mean older Blender versions will not be able to read UV
coordinates from the next release, due to an SDNA limitation.
Removed DispListMesh:
This now fully replaced by DerivedMesh. To provide access to arrays of
vertices, edges and faces, like DispListMesh does. The semantics of the
DerivedMesh.getVertArray() and similar functions were changed to return
a pointer to an array if one exists, or otherwise allocate a temporary
one. On releasing the DerivedMesh, this temporary array will be removed
automatically.
Removed ssDM and meshDM DerivedMesh backends:
The ssDM backend was for DispListMesh, so that became obsolete automatically.
The meshDM backend was replaced by the custom data backend, that now figures
out which layers need to be modified, and only duplicates those.
This changes code in many places, and overall removes 2514 lines of code.
So, there's a good chance this might break some stuff, although I've been
testing it for a few days now. The good news is, adding multiple color and
uv layers should now become easy.
Here's the full release log with example file.
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Render_Baking.827.0.html
For people who don't read docs; just press ALT+CTRL+B on a Mesh
with texture faces!
Todos:
- maybe some filter options extra?
- Make normal maps in Tangent space
Mist option and "Ray Transp" didn't work together yet. Transparency
during tracing should not be influenced with mist though (as is for
Ztransp), so for this case an extra color blending after raytrace is
added. Still pretty primitive... mostly because mist isn't volumetric
in Blender at all... just an alpha trick.
