* 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
This resolves some issues with correlation artifacts at higher sample counts.
Fix T101356, correlation issues in new PMJ pattern.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16561
This adds path guiding features into Cycles by integrating Intel's Open Path
Guiding Library. It can be enabled in the Sampling > Path Guiding panel in the
render properties.
This feature helps reduce noise in scenes where finding a path to light is
difficult for regular path tracing.
The current implementation supports guiding directional sampling decisions on
surfaces, when the material contains a least one diffuse component, and in
volumes with isotropic and anisotropic Henyey-Greenstein phase functions.
On surfaces, the guided sampling decision is proportional to the product of
the incident radiance and the normal-oriented cosine lobe and in volumes it
is proportional to the product of the incident radiance and the phase function.
The incident radiance field of a scene is learned and updated during rendering
after each per-frame rendering iteration/progression.
At the moment, path guiding is only supported by the CPU backend. Support for
GPU backends will be added in future versions of OpenPGL.
Ref T92571
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15286