This fixes the ptaxs "ACCESS_VIOLATION" error and should allow our Linux and Windows build bots to compile again.
Unfortunately this comes with a performance penalty on sm_2x cards, so this is only a workaround for now. Branched Path is still globally disabled on GPU.
In practice this means that if you don't connect a texture to your volume nodes
it will figure that out and render the node faster, rather than you having to
specify it manually.
Main weakness is custom OSL nodes where we have to assume it is heterogeneous
because we don't know what kind of data the node accesses.
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.
This removes a few optimizations to avoid exp() calls and division, they will be
added back later, at the moment it's more important to make the code easier to
understand and refactor.
Rather use random point in each step instead of giving the steps random sizes.
Gives a bit more accurate results with large step sizes, but also convenient
convention for later changes.
These can currently be accessed by adding an Attribute node and specifying one
of those three names. A Smoke/Fire node should be added at some point to make
this more convenient.
These values might change still before the release, in particular for flame the
meaning seems unclear, it's just values in the 0..1 range. This is useful for
color ramps, but it might be good if this was also available as temperature in
kelvin so it can be plugged into the blackbody node. But I couldn't figure out
from the smoke code if or how this corresponds to a physical unit.
Here's a (quite poor) example file for a fire + smoke setup:
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/27990
These are internally stored as a 3D image textures, but accessible like e.g.
UV coordinates though the attribute node and getattribute().
This is convenient for rendering e.g. smoke objects where data like density is
really a property of the mesh, and it avoids having to specify the smoke object
in a texture node, instead the material will work with any smoke domain.
Notes:
* The motion steps only affect deformation motion blur.
* The actual number of steps is 2^(steps - 1). This avoids having to sample at
many different times for object with more/fewer steps, now the times overlap.
* Deformation motion blur is enabled by default in existing files that have
motion blur enabled. If the object is not deforming, this will be detected at
export time, so raytracing performance will not be affected.
Part of the code is from the summer of code project by Gavin Howard.
This now supports multiple steps and subframe sampling of motion.
There is one difference for object and camera transform motion blur. It still
only supports two steps there, but the transforms are now sampled at subframe
times instead of the previous and next frame and then interpolated/extrapolated.
This will give different render results in some cases but it's more accurate.
Part of the code is from the summer of code project by Gavin Howard, but it has
been significantly rewritten and extended.
