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!
This implements branched path tracing for the split kernel.
General approach is to store the ray state at a branch point, trace the
branched ray as normal, then restore the state as necessary before iterating
to the next part of the path. A state machine is used to advance the indirect
loop state, which avoids the need to add any new kernels. Each iteration the
state machine recreates as much state as possible from the stored ray to keep
overall storage down.
Its kind of hard to keep all the different integration loops in sync, so this
needs lots of testing to make sure everything is working correctly. We should
probably start trying to deduplicate the integration loops more now.
Nonbranched BMW is ~2% slower, while classroom is ~2% faster, other scenes
could use more testing still.
Reviewers: sergey, nirved
Reviewed By: nirved
Subscribers: Blendify, bliblubli
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2611
