- autodetect optimal default, which typically avoids HT threads
- can store setting in .blend per scene
- this does not touch general omp max threads, due i found other areas where the calculations are fitting for huge corecount
- Intel notes, some of the older generation processors with HyperThreading would not provide significant performance boost for FPU intensive applications. On those systems you might want to set OMP_NUM_THREADS = total number of cores (not total number of hardware theads).
Previously, amplitude was more of an "absolute" value in the sense that whatever value
you set it to became a sort of "maximum bounce" height. However, it turns out that this
approach isn't so nice when dealing with large gaps between the values of two keyframes,
as the elastic easing equations expect that "amplitude > |change|" (where change is the
difference in values from key1 to key2).
Now, the "amplitude" value we pass to the easing functions are "|change| + amplitude".
This is easier to control, as now, as soon as you start changing that value, there are
immediately visible effects.
Non-mesh objects default to no collisions. lordloki provided a
patch that sets the collision properties for a mesh converted from
a curve/meta/surf/text to the default collision properties for
a mesh.
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.
This basically records all volumes steps, which can then later be used multiple
time to take scattering samples, without having to step through the volume
again. From the paper:
"Importance Sampling Techniques for Path Tracing in Participating Media"
This works only on the CPU, due to usage of malloc/free.
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.
