Add a `use_gpu()` function to the UI code for Cycles.
This is done to clean up some of the other code (`use_{backend}()`)
and to help isolate `use_multi_device` and `show_device_active` from
their context making them more robust to changes made in other parts
of the UI code.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/124134
The function `direction_to_<some projection model>` computes the inverse of `<some projection model>_to_direction`.
Some of these functions had a bug where they mirror the x-axis, and some of them could be simplified.
I added round-trip tests for all of them.
This MR might change the behavior of the renderer when using equiangular_cubemap_face_to_direction:
I normalized the result vector. I looked at the usages and I think it's normalized later anyways, but someone else should probably verify that this doesn't cause issues.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123932
Refactor the call to `_cycles.available_devices` into it's own function
and update `self.device` at the same time to avoid mis-matches between
`_cycles.available_devices` and `self.device`.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/124079
Embree device pointer can end up being nullptr even when Embree on GPU is
expected to be used. Previous implementation overlooked this possibility,
leading to a completely silent fallback to the non-Hardware ray-tracing path,
this commit fixes it. We've noticed this as now Embree relies on a driver
component: https://github.com/intel/level-zero-raytracing-support that can
potentially be missing from a system.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/124085
SYCL runtime currently relies on an internal driver behavior that will
break the driver version string returned by SYCL if it changes:
https://github.com/oneapi-src/unified-runtime/issues/1777
This will be fixed at SYCL runtime level but until we use a new enough
one, we need to add additional verifications to avoid blocking execution
on a driver that will change this internal behavior.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/124084
This resolves two issues:
1. On macOS the GPU Compute device would be disabled by default unless
the user opens user preferences. This is unexpected behaviour ever
since 09ba1486f8
2. Fixes incorrect automatic denoiser display settings and errors in
terminal related to the denoising UI on macOS if the user hasn't opened
user preferences.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123911
Fixes an issue where Blender would crash if the OptiX denoiser was
selected, but an unsupported GPU device (E.g. Intel GPU) was
selected in preferences.
This crash would occur because Cycles uses the device in preferences
to setup the denoiser, and there was no check stopping an unsupported
GPU from being used to try and setup and run the denoiser.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/124001
Setting this option to a value above zero replaces the lambertian Diffuse term
with the modified energy-preserving Oren-Nayar BSDF, which matches the OpenPBR
behavior.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123616
The function direction_to_fisheye_lens_polynomial computes the inverse of
fisheye_lens_polynomial_to_direction.
Previously the function worked almost correctly if all parameters except k_0
and k_1 were zero (in that case it was correct except for flipping the x-axis).
I replaced the fixed-point iteration (?) by Newton's method and implemented a
test to make sure it works correctly with a wider range of parameter sets.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123737
The function direction_to_fisheye_lens_polynomial computes the inverse of
fisheye_lens_polynomial_to_direction.
Previously the function worked almost correctly if all parameters except k_0
and k_1 were zero (in that case it was correct except for flipping the x-axis).
I replaced the fixed-point iteration (?) by Newton's method and implemented a
test to make sure it works correctly with a wider range of parameter sets.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123737
The Object node is not currently exposed in the XML API, but rather
implicitly created along with Mesh nodes. This prevents accessing
features that are dependent on this node, like caustics settings.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/cycles/pulls/8
The vertex normals and tangent space attributes are not currently exposed by
the XML API, in the Mesh node. This notably prevents the XML API user
from applying normal maps to meshes in tangent space.
To overcome this situation, this commit adds three attributes to the Mesh node:
N: vertex normals
tangent: tangents
tangent_sign: tangent signs
Nota: at the moment, these attributes are only available for non-subdivided
meshes.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/cycles/pulls/9
This is because with the addition of new features to Cycles, these GPUs
experienced significant performance regressions and bugs, all stemming
from bugs in the Metal GPU driver/compiler. The only reasonable way to
work around these issues was to disable parts of Cycles code on
these GPUs to avoid the driver/compiler bugs.
This resulted in increased development time maintaining these platforms
while being unable to deliver feature parity with other
GPU backends.
It has been decided that this development time is better spent
maintaining platforms that are still actively maintained by
hardware/software vendors, and so AMD and Intel GPU support will be
removed from the Metal backend for Cycles.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123551
On some Macs, MNEE would be disabled in Cycles to work around a bug.
However this just led to these devices skipping over MNEE related
parts of the rendering pipeline and not properly progressing through
the render.
This commit fixes this issue by properly disabling MNEE on these devices.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123765
when computing coefficients in volume, the volume density of the object
at the top of the stack is used, which leads to wrong result if
overlapping volumes have different scales.
This commit fixes the problem by pre-multiplying the volume density per
object when evaluating the shader.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123733
The original paper only considers the minimal distance of the cluster to
the ray, not the interval length, resulting in low weight for distant
lights that have large influence over a long distance.
This commit modifies the measure by considering `theta_b - theta_a` for
local lights and the ray length `t` for distant lights.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123537
Ever since the introduction of GPU OIDN denoising on CPU devices,
using the path_tracing_device info to pick the automatic denoiser has
typically led to incorrect results.
This commit fixes this issue by using the denoising device info to pick
the denoiser.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123593
Precompiled Cycles kernels make up a considerable fraction of the total size of
Blender builds nowadays. As we add more features and support for more
architectures, this will only continue to increase.
However, since these kernels tend to be quite compressible, we can save a lot
of storage by storing them in compressed form and decompressing the required
kernel(s) during loading.
By using Zstandard compression with a high level, we can get decent compression
ratios (~5x for the current kernels) while keeping decompression time low
(about 30ms in the worse case in my tests). And since we already require zstd
for Blender, this doesn't introduce a new dependency.
While the main improvement is to the size of the extracted Blender installation
(which is reduced by ~400-500MB currently), this also shrinks the download on
Windows, since .zip's deflate compression is less effective. It doesn't help on
Linux since we're already using .tar.xz there, but the smaller installed size
is still a good thing.
See #123522 for initial discussion.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123557
The Oren Nayer diffuse BSDF had a energy compensation term added in a
recent commit[1]. This energy compensation term used the colour input
in it's computation. The colour input was clamped in SVM, but not OSL,
resulting in differences between the two backends. This commit resolves
this issue by clamping the colour in the OSL script to match SVM.
[1] 5e40b9bb5c
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123527
Cycles automatic denoiser picker assumed that OIDN could not be
run on the GPU while the CPU was the render device. So if the user was
using their CPU for rendering, the automatic denoiser picker would
"fallback" to a different denoiser (OptiX or CPU OIDN). This was true
in Blender 4.1, but changed in 4.2. The UI assumed that OIDN could run
on the GPU if there was a compatible OIDN GPU device.
This lead to a issue on systems using the CPU for rendering
while having a NVIDIA GPU installed in the system. The
UI suggested that OIDN would be used, and would switch between
CPU and GPU depending on user preferences. But the automatic
denoiser picker in Cycle's backend said OIDN could not run on
the GPU in this situation and would always "fallback" to the
OptiX denoiser running on the NVIDIA GPU.
This created a mismatch between the UI and what Cycles was
acutally doing. This issue did not effect other GPU vendors because
their "fallback" was the OIDN denoiser.
This commit fixes this issue by aligning the Cycles automatic
denoiser picker in the backend with the UI. Using OIDN if a GPU
is supported, falling back to OptiX if it's not supported,
falling back to OIDN CPU if OptiX isn't supported,
then falling back to no denoiser if that's not supported.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123530
This patch implements a new Gabor noise node based on [1] but with the
improvements from [2] and the phasor formulation from [3].
We compare with the most popular existing implementation, that of OSL,
from the user's point of view:
- This implementation produces C1 continuous noise as opposed to the
non continuous OSL implementation, so it can be used for bump
mapping and is generally smother. This is achieved by windowing the
Gabor kernel using a Hann window.
- The Bandwidth input of OSL was hard-coded to 1 and was replaced with
a frequency input, which OSL hard codes to 2, since frequency is
more natural to control. This is even more true now that that Gabor
kernel is windowed as opposed to truncated, which means increasing
the bandwidth will just turn the Gaussian component of the Gabor
into a Hann window. While decreasing the bandwidth will eliminate
the harmonic from the Gabor kernel, which is the point of Gabor
noise.
- OSL had three discrete modes of operation for orienting the kernel.
Anisotropic, Isotropic, and a hybrid mode. While this implementation
provides a continuous Anisotropy parameter which users are already
familiar with from the Glossy BSDF node.
- This implementation provides not just the Gabor noise value, but
also its phase and intensity components. The Gabor noise value is
basically sin(phase) * intensity, but the phase is arguably more
useful since it does not suffer from the low contrast issues that
Gabor suffers from. While the intensity is useful to hide the
singularities in the phase.
- This implementation converges faster that OSL's relative to the
impulse count, so we fix the impulses count to 8 for simplicitly.
- This implementation does not implement anisotropic filtering.
Future improvements to the node includes implementing surface noise and
filtering. As well as extending the spectral control of the noise,
either by providing specialized kernels as was done in #110802, or by
providing some more procedural control over the frequencies of the
Gabor.
References:
[1]: Lagae, Ares, et al. "Procedural noise using sparse Gabor
convolution." ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 28.3 (2009): 1-10.
[2]: Tavernier, Vincent, et al. "Making gabor noise fast and
normalized." Eurographics 2019-40th Annual Conference of the European
Association for Computer Graphics. 2019.
[3]: Tricard, Thibault, et al. "Procedural phasor noise." ACM
Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 38.4 (2019): 1-13.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/121820
