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.
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.
