Currently the shade smooth status for mesh faces is stored as part of
`MPoly::flag`. As described in #95967, this moves that information
to a separate boolean attribute. It also flips its status, so the
attribute is now called `sharp_face`, which mirrors the existing
`sharp_edge` attribute. The attribute doesn't need to be allocated
when all faces are smooth. Forward compatibility is kept until
4.0 like the other mesh refactors.
This will reduce memory bandwidth requirements for some operations,
since the array of booleans uses 12 times less memory than `MPoly`.
It also allows faces to be stored more efficiently in the future, since
the flag is now unused. It's also possible to use generic functions to
process the values. For example, finding whether there is a sharp face
is just `sharp_faces.contains(true)`.
The `shade_smooth` attribute is no longer accessible with geometry nodes.
Since there were dedicated accessor nodes for that data, that shouldn't
be a problem. That's difficult to version automatically since the named
attribute nodes could be used in arbitrary combinations.
**Implementation notes:**
- The attribute and array variables in the code use the `sharp_faces`
term, to be consistent with the user-facing "sharp faces" wording,
and to avoid requiring many renames when #101689 is implemented.
- Cycles now accesses smooth face status with the generic attribute,
to avoid overhead.
- Changing the zero-value from "smooth" to "flat" takes some care to
make sure defaults are the same.
- Versioning for the edge mode extrude node is particularly complex.
New nodes are added by versioning to propagate the attribute in its
old inverted state.
- A lot of access is still done through the `CustomData` API rather
than the attribute API because of a few functions. That can be
cleaned up easily in the future.
- In the future we would benefit from a way to store attributes as a
single value for when all faces are sharp.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/104422
Some UI functions have a "translate" argument, which if set to False
specifies that the message is not to be translated. This sometimes
means that it was already translated beforehands.
But many messages were still getting extracted, sometimes twice in
different contexts. Some featured errors because the arguments of
various functions would be concatenated, such as:
```
col.label(text=iface_("Branch: %s") % bpy.app.build_branch.decode('utf-8', 'replace'), translate=False)
```
which would get extracted as:
```
msgid "Branch: %sutf-8replace"
```
Pull Request #105417
To improve mesh upload speeds and reduce the size of the scene data which allows larger scenes to be rendered.
The meshes in Cycles are currently stored as flattened meshes, where each triangle is stored as a set of 3 vertices. Unflattening writes out the vertices in a list according to the index buffer. This uses a lot of memory and for current hardware does not provide a noticeable benefit. This change unflattens the mesh by directly using the meshes vertex and index buffers directly and skips the unflattening. This change allows for larger scenes and also a reduction in the sizes of the meshes. Further it results in a decrease the amount of time it takes to upload the data to a GPU. This is especially important for when multiple GPUs are used in a single machine.
Pull Request #105173
Cycles fallback display shader previously did not use viewport.
This would crash or cause the display not to show when using
GPU backends other than OpenGL, if another display shader
was unavailable.
Now use ShaderCreateInfo for Cycles fallback display.
Authored by Apple: Michael Parkin-White
Ref #96261
Pull Request #104987
The light tree itself is disabled on the AMD GPUs due to a compiler issue.
There are couple of places where this was not fully checked:
- The `light_sample` function in the kernel.
- The light threshold during synchronization
The former one is solved as easy as just adding an ifdef block.
The latter one is solved by delaying the threshold assignment for
later on.
Pull Request #105022
This reverts commit 19222627c6.
Something went wrong here, seems like this commit merged the main branch
into the release branch, which should never be done.
This reverts commit 68181c2560.
I merged 3.6 into 3.5 by mistake. Basically I had a PR against main,
then changed it in the last minute to be against 3.5 via the
web-interface unaware that I shouldn't do it without updating the
patch.
Original Pull Request: #104889
Note that the node group has its sockets names
translated, while the built-in nodes don't.
So we need to use data_ for the built-in nodes names,
and the sockets of the created node groups.
Pull Request #104889
The internal compiler error appears to be gone. Unclear why it appeared in the
first place and why it's gone now. Just random kernel code changes causing it.
Pull Request #104719
The required version numbers for various devices was hardcoded in the
UI messages. The result was that every time one of these versions was
bumped, every language team had to update the message in question.
Instead, the version numbers can be extracted, and injected into the
error messages using string formatting so that translation updates
need happen less frequently.
Pull Request #104488
Cycles ignores the size of spot lights, therefore the illuminated area doesn't match the gizmo. This patch resolves this discrepancy.
| Before (Cycles) | After (Cycles) | Eevee
|{F14200605}|{F14200595}|{F14200600}|
This is done by scaling the ray direction by the size of the cone. The implementation of `spot_light_attenuation()` in `spot.h` matches `spot_attenuation()` in `lights_lib.glsl`.
**Test file**:
{F14200728}
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D17129
A noticeable (>5%) performance regression in oneAPI backend came with
a501a2dbff. Updating to latest graphics
compiler from driver 101.4032 fixes it.
I've tested it with current min-supported drivers and it runs well but
since compatibility of graphics compiler with older drivers isn't
guaranteed, I'm also bumping the min-supported driver versions.
If end-users consider latest drivers too fresh to switch to (version
isn't released as stable on Linux as of today but should be before
Blender 3.5 release), CYCLES_ONEAPI_ALL_DEVICES=1 env variable can be
used.
Intel Graphics Compiler on Linux will be updated in a later commit
so we can then close D16984.
Reviewed By: sergey, LazyDodo
While keeping SSE2, SSE4.1 and AVX2. This does not affect hardware support, it
only slightly reduces performance for some older CPUs.
To reduce maintenance cost and improve compile times.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16978
Cycles converts internal links to converter nodes which don't do anything and
later on get collapsed by the graph optimization. However, the previous code
assumed that one Blender input socket maps to one Cycles input socket.
When a node is muted, there might be internal links from one input to multiple
outputs. In Cycles, this meant that one Blender input socket now mapped to
multiple input sockets on all the converter nodes, so only the last one survived.
THe fix is simple, just make the mapping a MultiMap.
With the GPU API the sampler can not be set after texture binding, which caused
a delay of the actual change. Now do both in a single call for correctness and
performance.
**Changes**
As described in T93602, this patch removes all use of the `MVert`
struct, replacing it with a generic named attribute with the name
`"position"`, consistent with other geometry types.
Variable names have been changed from `verts` to `positions`, to align
with the attribute name and the more generic design (positions are not
vertices, they are just an attribute stored on the point domain).
This change is made possible by previous commits that moved all other
data out of `MVert` to runtime data or other generic attributes. What
remains is mostly a simple type change. Though, the type still shows up
859 times, so the patch is quite large.
One compromise is that now `CD_MASK_BAREMESH` now contains
`CD_PROP_FLOAT3`. With the general move towards generic attributes
over custom data types, we are removing use of these type masks anyway.
**Benefits**
The most obvious benefit is reduced memory usage and the benefits
that brings in memory-bound situations. `float3` is only 3 bytes, in
comparison to `MVert` which was 4. When there are millions of vertices
this starts to matter more.
The other benefits come from using a more generic type. Instead of
writing algorithms specifically for `MVert`, code can just use arrays
of vectors. This will allow eliminating many temporary arrays or
wrappers used to extract positions.
Many possible improvements aren't implemented in this patch, though
I did switch simplify or remove the process of creating temporary
position arrays in a few places.
The design clarity that "positions are just another attribute" brings
allows removing explicit copying of vertices in some procedural
operations-- they are just processed like most other attributes.
**Performance**
This touches so many areas that it's hard to benchmark exhaustively,
but I observed some areas as examples.
* The mesh line node with 4 million count was 1.5x (8ms to 12ms) faster.
* The Spring splash screen went from ~4.3 to ~4.5 fps.
* The subdivision surface modifier/node was slightly faster
RNA access through Python may be slightly slower, since now we need
a name lookup instead of just a custom data type lookup for each index.
**Future Improvements**
* Remove uses of "vert_coords" functions:
* `BKE_mesh_vert_coords_alloc`
* `BKE_mesh_vert_coords_get`
* `BKE_mesh_vert_coords_apply{_with_mat4}`
* Remove more hidden copying of positions
* General simplification now possible in many areas
* Convert more code to C++ to use `float3` instead of `float[3]`
* Currently `reinterpret_cast` is used for those C-API functions
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D15982
This patch adds a new "Kernel Optimization Level" dropdown menu to control Metal kernel specialisation. Currently this defaults to "full" optimisation, on the assumption that the changes proposed in D16371 will address usability concerns around app responsiveness and shader cache housekeeping.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16514
This panel showed a duplication of options that were in the main light panel and only mistakenly shows up in the workbench engine where lights should have no options.
This panel was also used by the POV-Ray add-on but that was removed recently.
The `render_color_index` skips attributes with different types
and domains in order to give the proper order for the UI list.
That is a different than an index in the group of all attributes.
The most solid solution I could think of is exposing the name of
the default color attribute. It's "solid" because we always address
attributes by name internally. Doing something different is bound
to create problems. It's also aligned with the design in T98366 and
D15169.
Another option would be to change the way the "attribute index"
is incremented in Cycles. That would be a valid solution, but would
be more complex and annoying.
For consistency, I also exposed the name of the active color attribute
the same way, though it isn't necessary to fix this particular bug.
The properties aren't editable, that can come in 3.5 as part of D15169.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16769
The first two dimensions of scrambled, shuffled Sobol and shuffled PMJ02 are
equivalent, so this makes no real difference for the first two dimensions.
But Sobol allows us to naturally extend to more dimensions.
Pretabulated Sobol is now always used, and the sampling pattern settings is now
only available as a debug option.
This in turn allows the following two things (also implemented):
* Use proper 3D samples for combined lens + motion blur sampling. This
notably reduces the noise on objects that are simultaneously out-of-focus
and motion blurred.
* Use proper 3D samples for combined light selection + light sampling.
Cycles was already doing something clever here with 2D samples, but using
3D samples is more straightforward and avoids overloading one of the
dimensions.
In the future this will also allow for proper sampling of e.g. volumetric
light sources and other things that may need three or four dimensions.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16443
While it helps on many scenes, it can be disruptive for existing scenes and
for benchmarks the differences in timing can be confusing. So be a bit more
conservative and only it enable it for new scenes.
Recently a new geometry node for splitting edges was added in D16399.
However, there was already a similar implementation in mesh.cc that was
mainly used to fake auto smooth support in Cycles by splitting sharp
edges and edges around sharp faces.
While there are still possibilities for optimization in the new code,
the implementation is safer and simpler, multi-threaded, and aligns
better with development plans for caching topology on Mesh and other
recent developments with attributes.
This patch removes the old code and moves the node implementation to
the geometry module so it can be used in editors and RNA. The "free
loop normals" argument is deprecated now, since it was only an internal
optimization exposed for Cycles.
The new mesh `editors` function creates an `IndexMask` of edges to
split by reusing some of the code from the corner normal calculation.
This change will help to simplify the changes in D16530 and T102858.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16732
Improve a few messages, but mostly fix typos in many areas of the UI.
See inline comments in the differential revisiion for the rationale
behind the various changes.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16716
**Problem**:
Area lights in Cycles have spread angle, in which case some part of the area light might be invisible to a shading point. The current implementation samples the whole area light, resulting some samples invisible and thus simply discarded. A technique is applied on rectangular light to sample a subset of the area light that is potentially visible (rB3f24cfb9582e1c826406301d37808df7ca6aa64c), however, ellipse (including disk) area lights remained untreated. The purpose of this patch is to apply a techniques to ellipse area light.
**Related Task**:
T87053
**Results**:
These are renderings before and after the patch:
|16spp|Disk light|Ellipse light|Square light (for reference, no changes)
|Before|{F13996789}|{F13996788}|{F13996822}
|After|{F13996759}|{F13996787}|{F13996852}
**Explanation**:
The visible region on an area light is found by drawing a cone from the shading point to the plane where the area light lies, with the aperture of the cone being the light spread.
{F13990078,height=200}
Ideally, we would like to draw samples only from the intersection of the area light and the projection of the cone onto the plane (forming a circle). However, the shape of the intersection is often irregular and thus hard to sample from directly.
{F13990104,height=200}
Instead, the current implementation draws samples from the bounding rectangle of the intersection. In this case, we still end up with some invalid samples outside of the circle, but already much less than sampling the original area light, and the bounding rectangle is easy to sample from.
{F13990125}
The above technique is only applied to rectangle area lights, ellipse area light still suffers from poor sampling. We could apply a similar technique to ellipse area lights, that is, find the
smallest regular shape (rectangle, circle, or ellipse) that covers the intersection (or maybe not the smallest but easy to compute).
For disk area light, we consider the relative position of both circles. Denoting `dist` as the distance between the centre of two circles, and `r1`, `r2` their radii. If `dist > r1 + r2`, the area light is completely invisible, we directly return `false`. If `dist < abs(r1 - r2)`, the smaller circle lies inside the larger one, and we sample whichever circle is smaller. Otherwise, the two circles intersect, we compute the bounding rectangle of the intersection, in which case `axis_u`, `len_u`, `axis_v`, `len_v` needs to be computed anew. Depending on the distance between the two circles, `len_v` is either the diameter of the smaller circle or the length of the common chord.
|{F13990211,height=195}|{F13990225,height=195}|{F13990274,height=195}|{F13990210,height=195}
|`dist > r1 + r2`|`dist < abs(r1 - r2)`|`dist^2 < abs(r1^2 - r2^2)`|`dist^2 > abs(r1^2 - r2^2)`
For ellipse area light, it's hard to find the smallest bounding shape of the intersection, therefore, we compute the bounding rectangle of the ellipse itself, then treat it as a rectangle light.
|{F13990386,height=195}|{F13990385,height=195}|{F13990387,height=195}
We also check the areas of the bounding rectangle of the intersection, the ellipse (disk) light, and the spread circle, then draw samples from the smallest shape of the three. For ellipse light, this also detects where one shape lies inside the other. I am not sure if we should add this measure to rectangle area light and sample from the spread circle when it has smaller area, as we seem to have a better sampling technique for rectangular (uniformly sample the solid angle). Maybe we could add [area-preserving parameterization for spherical
ellipse](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.09048.pdf) in the future.
**Limitation**:
At some point we switch from sampling the ellipse to sampling the rectangle, depending on the area of the both, and there seems to be a visible line (with |slope| =1) on the final rendering
which demonstrate at which point we switch between the two methods. We could see that the new sampling method clearly has lower variance near the boundaries, but close to that visible line,
the rectangle sampling method seems to have larger variance. I could not spot any bug in the implementation, and I am not sure if this happens because different sampling patterns for ellipse and rectangle are used.
|Before (256spp)|After (256spp)
|{F13996995}|{F13996998}
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16694
Part of the workaround for NVIDIA driver issue got lost in the changes to
switch to the GPU module.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D16709
Bugs that caused wrong renders should be fixed now, and tests that showed minor
floating point differences on platforms were tweaked to sidestep the problem.
Ref T77889
