Thanks to testing in studio orange (thnx andy, matt!) I've found the
simple way to code it.
Static particle systems, when not set to wire or halo, now render 1 pixel
wide 'strands', which are actually just faces with vertexnormals and
proper orco texture. Check for quick fun;
http://www.blender.org/bf/rt5.jpg
(and rt6, rt7, rt8)
<blush>Missing "2*" caused AO tables to be only initialized half</blush>
Result was bad AO quality in render, and unpredictable brightness. This bug
happened in previous commit, when fixing random table issues.
- AO and soft shadow AreaLight tables were generated without fixed seed,
causing animations to give unwanted amounts of noise.
- Made sure these tables now are calculated before render, with fixed seed
- Then found out the BLI_rand() has very bad seeding... it showed up as
patterns. After some experimenting, found a nice method using noise.c
hash tables. For compatibility with old code, named it BLI_srandom() to
use this next to the BLI_srand(). This follows libc rand() and random()
naming convention.
- Then of course threading should work... so made a BLI_thread_rand version
of the calls. Now supports up to 16 threads, comments added in .h and .c
Result is stable animation render with AO and soft shadow. But, please
test and feedback!
to get rid of faces with MFace.v3==0
- change all Mesh's to have ->medge now. This is forced by make_edges
on readfile, and in the various exotic important routines, and on
conversion back in python.
- make python NMesh structure always have medges now (needs testing)
- with above two changes it is guarenteed that mf->v3 is never ==0
in main blender code (i.e., all MFace's are actually triangles
or quads) and so I went through and removed all the historic tests
to deal with MFace.v3==0. Equals lots of deleting, I am in heaven!
- removed MEdge edcode flag, no longer needed
- added experimental replacement for edge flag system
Still are some inconsistencies in FACESELECT mode edge drawing to
be ironed out.
NOTE: This commit adds an experimental edge flag calc system, based
on 10-seconds-of-thought algorithm by yours truly. Would appreciate
feedback on how this system works, esp compared to old one and esp
on complex or interesting models.
To Use: New system is enabled by setting G.rt to a value between
1 and 1000 (Value of 0 uses old system). Value 1000 is reserved for
"auto" edge, which is more or less identical to old system but also
makes sure that at least 10% of edges are drawn (solves errors for
super subdivided meshes). Values between 1 and 999 act as percent
(out of 1000) of edges that should be drawn, starting with "most
interesting" edges first. Please try it and comment!
- removed {lattice,curve}_modifier functions
- changed render code to use displist for curve rendering
instead of making its own. required adding a bevelSplitFlag
field to DispList. I also fixed the bevel face splitting
which did not work correctly in many situations.
- changed so all curve data creation happens in makeDispListCurveTypes,
includes making bevel list and filling polys
- changed render code to use displist for surface rendering
- removed Curve.orco variable, built as needed now
- removed stupid BLI_setScanFill* functions... why use a function
argument when you can use a global and two functions! Why indeed.
(this fixed crash when reloading a file with filled curves and
toggling editmode)
- bug fix, setting curve width!=1 disabled simple bevel for no
apparent reason
- cleaned up lots and lots of curve/displist code (fun example:
"if(dl->type==DL_INDEX3 || dl->type==DL_INDEX3)"). Hmmm!
- switched almost all lattice calls to go through lattice_deform_verts,
only exception left is particles
- added DBG_show_shared_render_faces function in render, just
helps to visualize which verts are shared while testing (no
user interface).
- renamed some curve bevel buttons and rewrote tooltips to be
more obvious
- made CU_FAST work without dupfontbase hack
Also by the way I wrote down some notes on how curve code
works, nothing spiffy but it is at:
http://wiki.blender.org/bin/view.pl/Blenderdev/CurveNotes
really work at all. Fortunately no one actually *USES* nurbs so
no one noticed. This is bug from NaN days (strubi, I am looking at
you here) which I guess says a lot (or a little) about NURBS usage.
And as usual, the correct code is shorter.
- added do_version copy of ME_OPT_EDGES flag
- added ME_EDGERENDER flag, barely changes things atm except makes
sure plain meshes with FasterDraw/etc set still render all edges.
The edge drawing system needs a bit of a revamping - it is a cool
feature but could use several improvements:
(1) The algorithm could be better in choosing the best edges to
draw.
(2) The drawflags should interact well with modifiers. It is wierd
to have a large grid with a deformer that draws no edges because
flags are only calculated based on base mesh.
(3) Drawflags should not be destroyed by editmode. Better design
would be a "Draw % of edges" button.
Of course, could also be the feature is not worth it and we
should just drop. Feel free to comment if you have an opinion.
DLM to share data from DerivedMesh (reduces some copying/memory allocation)
- added displistmesh_copyShared function to copy a DLM but not duplicate any
internal data
- changed crease drawing to use DerivedMesh functions... this means varying
edge width style of creases had to go, I replaced by using varying color to
show crease weight instead. Don't think this is a big loss since the subsurf
result gives you a much better indication of the crease weight anyway.
- bug fix in mirror modifier, didn't copy edge creases from editmesh correctly
- XCode project
- Scons :
scons stopped working for Os X in the last month (dont know when) :
* the '.' and '..' keywords in CCPPATH
are not recognized anymore for sconscripts compiling files at
a sub level
* when doing a scons clean, the 3 subdirs in build dir are removed
and scons then fail to recreate them (exten, intern, source)
this commit solve the first problem as a temp workaround
for the latter simply recreate the dirs manually
I will investigate that further when on vacations, which i should already
be.
;(
all 3 build systems are now working on Os X
- remove python access to Optimal and Subsurf flags (they don't
work this way anymore, I suppose need to replace with python
access to modifiers but not going to do right now).
- removed interface access to OPTIMAL mode, needs to be rethough...
this means at the moment subsurfs outside editmode always draw
and render all edges
- Bug #2857: Spin didn't create nice consistant normals
- removed unnecessary call to where_is_object() in init-render phase.
- Added DAG_scene_sort() calls when objects were removed (join cases)
- When using texture fonts, the file window header didn't display OK
- Saving a file didn't set the 'wait cursor' anymore (oldie!)
and passed over faces twice
- changed init_render_mesh to *always* call calc_vertexnormals. Vertex normal
calculation is insignificant time wise in comparison to modern renders so
it wasn't a big savings anyway, and vertex normals were sometimes incorrect.
Still issue remaining regarding what to do with wire normals.
based on time change. would be nice if dep graph could handle this.
- made dep check if modifiers need update on time change
- fix render crash (access null)
- added new Build Effect modifier type. compared to old one works as
a full member of modifier system, means can apply subsurf, etc on
it, reorder, what have you. and it is all nice and self contained.
- removed old Build effect, old files convert to new style on load
- couldn't help myself, added a randomize feature to build effect
- removed Python BuildEffect support
builds new DerivedMesh... caching can come later)
- split DerivedMesh returning functions into editmesh and mesh groups
- got rid of DL_NORS displist type (get built on fly for mesh when
needed)
- got rid of Mesh.disp (yay!)
- started to punch DerivedMesh returning functions into shape to introduce
modifier stack
- switch renderer to store orco's in a hash table instead of
caching in mesh (I don't like the renderer caching data
in the actual mesh structure)
- added mesh_create_orco[_render] function
- changed mesh_get_derived_render to always return a DerivedMesh (even if
no subsurf)
- changed init_render_mesh to always get the mesh data through a
DerivedMesh
situations where data can be shared easily.
- added convertDisplistToMesh function for regular mesh DerivedMesh
interface (how many times can *you* use mesh in one sentence?)
- do_puno was uninitialized in init_render_mesh
- added mesh_get_derived_final (temporary), difference from
mesh_get_derived is it always returns a derived mesh, even if
no subsurf.
- appropriate callers of makeDispList replaced with depgraph calls
- unappropriate places just killed... small chance this gives some
errors in corner cases if dep graph isn't notified (example, font
family displists) but these can be tracked down as they show up.
- still a large number of callers of makeDispListCurveTypes, but
makeDispListMesh has just a few.
still a makeDispList that dispatches to the appropriate one.
makeDispList is on the way out and this makes it easier to track down
exactly which places use makedispList and for what types of objects.
- switch calls to makeDispList to appropriate more specific function (if
the object type is known by caller).
- added mesh_changed function that invalidates cached mesh data (but does
not rebuild, mesh data gets rebuilt on access). Most old calls to
makeDispListMesh use this instead now.
Aim was to get a total refresh of the animation system. This
is needed because;
- we need to upgrade it with 21st century features
- current code is spaghetti/hack combo, and hides good design
- it should become lag-free with using dependency graphs
A full log, with complete code API/structure/design explanation
will follow, that's a load of work... so here below the list with
hot changes;
- The entire object update system (matrices, geometry) is now
centralized. Calls to where_is_object and makeDispList are
forbidden, instead we tag objects 'changed' and let the
depgraph code sort it out
- Removed all old "Ika" code
- Depgraph is aware of all relationships, including meta balls,
constraints, bevelcurve, and so on.
- Made depgraph aware of relation types and layers, to do smart
flushing of 'changed' events. Nothing gets calculated too often!
- Transform uses depgraph to detect changes
- On frame-advance, depgraph flushes animated changes
Armatures;
Almost all armature related code has been fully built from scratch.
It now reveils the original design much better, with a very clean
implementation, lag free without even calculating each Bone more than
once. Result is quite a speedup yes!
Important to note is;
1) Armature is data containing the 'rest position'
2) Pose is the changes of rest position, and always on object level.
That way more Objects can use same Pose. Also constraints are in Pose
3) Actions only contain the Ipos to change values in Poses.
- Bones draw unrotated now
- Drawing bones speedup enormously (10-20 times)
- Bone selecting in EditMode, selection state is saved for PoseMode,
and vice-versa
- Undo in editmode
- Bone renaming does vertexgroups, constraints, posechannels, actions,
for all users of Armature in entire file
- Added Bone renaming in NKey panel
- Nkey PoseMode shows eulers now
- EditMode and PoseMode now have 'active' bone too (last clicked)
- Parenting in EditMode' CTRL+P, ALT+P, with nice options!
- Pose is added in Outliner now, with showing that constraints are in
the Pose, not Armature
- Disconnected IK solving from constraints. It's a separate phase now,
on top of the full Pose calculations
- Pose itself has a dependency graph too, so evaluation order is lag free.
TODO NOW;
- Rotating in Posemode has incorrect inverse transform (Martin will fix)
- Python Bone/Armature/Pose API disabled... needs full recode too
(wait for my doc!)
- Game engine will need upgrade too
- Depgraph code needs revision, cleanup, can be much faster!
(But, compliments for Jean-Luc, it works like a charm!)
- IK changed, it now doesnt use previous position to advance to next
position anymore. That system looks nice (no flips) but is not well
suited for NLA and background render.
TODO LATER;
We now can do loadsa new nifty features as well; like:
- Kill PoseMode (can be option for armatures itself)
- Make B-Bones (Bezier, Bspline, like for spines)
- Move all silly button level edit to 3d window (like CTRL+I = add
IK)
- Much better & informative drawing
- Fix action/nla editors
- Put all ipos in Actions (object, mesh key, lamp color)
- Add hooks
- Null bones
- Much more advanced constraints...
Bugfixes;
- OGL render (view3d header) had wrong first frame on anim render
- Ipo 'recording' mode had wrong playback speed
- Vertex-key mode now sticks to show 'active key', until frame change
-Ton-
ESC during alt+a playback.
Solved in the 'proper' way, which is not abusing the (while render)
ESC callback for UI draw of stars, this confused everything. Means;
you cannot esc stars drawing anymore. Nice feature, bad hack...
Appending from files also set the string for "last loaded file". That's
a real bad one... so you can save over accidentally libraries.
Another fix: appending from files that have dynamic other files linked
with relative paths didn't work. (Yah, now it should all work!)
renderconverter change is just a more clear comment.
parameters the material preset menu won't be as useful. Both glass presets will look the same
because there is no 'filter' parameter in the old yafray for instance.
So using the new Blender version with an old yafray version should work a bit better,
though the other way around, using the new yafray with an old blender version, will generally
not work as well.
I added a few extra things. In 'yafray' panel re-arranged some buttons, and added a new
button 'Clamp RGB'. This button will be enabled by default and helps to improve AA on
high contrast edges in the image. When using bokeh however, it is best to switch this off,
otherwise lens shaped highlights will be quite a bit less visible.
Changed the 'extinction' parameter name to the probably more correct term 'absorption',
though mathematically it works out the same. Also changed the behaviour of this color,
it no longer specifies a color that will be removed as I wrote in the previous commit,
but instead the actual color at one (blender) unit of distance. The 'Ds' (distance scale)
button below the color sliders controls the scaling of this unit distance.
What this means is that if you take the standard blender cube, which covers two units of
distance by default, setting the distance scale button to 2.0 will make sure that the color
you specified is exactly that color at that distance (provided the base color itself is white
of course, or 'filter' is 0, otherwise it will be filtered by the base color too).
Beyond this distance the color will get darker.
The glow option for point/soft/sphere lights has a new parameter 'GloOfs', or glow offset.
Setting this to a higher value then 0 will soften the central peak of the glow.
Another unreported bug fix: For xml export, when yafray failed to render the xml file
for some unknown reason, or because of other problems, the export code would still load
the previously rendered image, this causes problems however if the image resolution is
not the same as the current Blender buffer, and so could cause memory corruption or crashes.
This is now taken into account.
World image backgrounds now use the blender mapping settings as well, but only the
'AngMap', 'Sphere' and 'Tube' settings. But in yafray those last two, unlike Blender, cover
the whole view, not just the upper half, so is not really fully compatible with yafray.
So now you have to set one of these buttons too when loading a hdr lightprobe image.
btw, something I forgot to mention in previous commits is that the exposure control using
the texture brightness slider is no longer restricted to integer values. It is now a
floating point value, so you're not restricted to the 0 1 and 2 slider positions anymore,
anything in between will work too.
And finally, display updating is now more like Blender, using the mouse cursor as frame
counter for animation, etc.
of course...)
Not quite complete, but due to lack of time as good as it will get for now.
From the previous commit, forgot to report that basic fog is supported as well. Though because I had not much time to complete the code, it is sort of unfinished, and you will have
to tweak parameters specifically for yafray again. It uses only the world horizon color, and
only uses the Blender mist distance setting.
Textures now support checker clip mode.
Fixed possibly all 'duplilist non-empty' errors, though it could hide the real cause of the
error.
AA is no longer enabled automatically for certain GI quality settings, I thought it best to
leave it to the user to decide.
SkyDome GI mode now supports cache as well. There is a new option in the GI quality menu 'Use
Blender AO settings', which will as it says use the most important AO settings for the
skydome parameters. The only AO parameters used are 'Samples', 'Dist' and the random sampling
switch, which unlike in Blender you might want to use more often, since the QMC sampling used
in yafray can result in visible patterns or a dithering type look. 'Random' is not completely
random in yafray however, it is actually jittered (stratified) sampling.
Using an occlusion cache, doesn't necessarily mean that you will always get much shorter
render times. As with 'full' GI and cache, one problem is bumpmaps, when using bump (or
normal) maps, the sampling will be much more dense, using lots more rendertime.
As a temporary fix there is a button 'NoBump', but this also has the side effect that in
areas of total indirect light (or when used with SkyDome cache) no bumpmapping will be
visible. It is therefor best used with some direct light as well.
For SkyDome with cache, and strong bumpmapping it might actually not make much difference,
since for low distance values you can usually get away with low sample values as well.
The entire material panel is now replaced by another panel to show only the parameters
important to yafray and add some new ones as well.
Since lots of users (especially yafray beginners) have had problems getting certain material
aspects right, there is now a material preset menu available to hopefully solve some of the
most common "How do I do this? It doesn't work!" questions seen in various forums.
Choosing an option from this menu will set the required parameters to default
values for yafray, and you can work your way from there to tweak it something you want.
Most buttons are copies of the same Blender parameters, with some variations. Just like
Blender 'Ray Mirror' enables reflection, 'Ray Transp' enables refraction. You can use
'ZTransp' for materials that have texture maps with alpha channels.
Again, same as Blender 'rayMir' sets the amount of reflection. Next button 'frsOfs' however
controls fresnel offset, meaning that when this is set to 1, you will get no fresnel effect
and when set to 5, reflection is totally determined by fresnel, which is important for
realistic glass/metals/etc.
IOR is self-explanatory (...), same as Blender.
When you have 'Ray Transp' enabled, the blender 'filter' button will appear next to the IOR
button. This has the same effect as in Blender.
Below that there are some new parameters, 'Ext.Color' sets the extinction color for
transparent materials. Usually, in real transparent materials, light loses some of it's
energy the further it has to travel through the object. This effect can be simulated with
this parameter. Thing to look out for is that it specifies the color which will be
REMOVED after traveling through the object. What this means is that say you have a clear
white glass sphere, and set the extinction color to a strong blue, the result will be a
very yellow object when rendered.
Next to the color sliders, there is another set of three parameters, with which you can
enable color dispersion for transparent objects. 'Pwr' sets the amount of dispersion,
the higher, the more dispersion (the more colorful the result).
(For real world materials, this number can be found or derived from data in various glass catalogues)
The 'Samples' button below that sets the number of samples used, minimum values are around
7-10, and for very strong dispersion you might need a lot more.
As usual, this also means an increase in render time of course, but to simulate
realistic materials, you shouldn't really need more than 25 samples.
In addition to that, when using low sample numbers, but to still get a good spread of colors,
you can enable the jitter button, but this will also add noise.
Point/soft(point with shadowbuffer) or sphere lights (light with radius), have a new option
to add a simple glow effect, so that lights can be made visible.
NOTE: just like spotlight halo's, glow is not visible against the background, there must be
another object behind it. Simplest solution is to use a large black shadeless plane behind
your scene.
The glow intensity can be set with the 'GlowInt' parameter (use very low values around 0.01
even lower), and you can choose from two different types with the 'GlowType' button (which
don't look much different, but type 1 is probably better, type 0 faster).
And that's it, with apologies for the still missing features and
full support in general, but this will have to do for now.
This combo didnt render OK:
1 Armature has Empties parented to Bones
2 Curve has these Empties as Hooks
3 Mesh is deformed with this Curve
Could be solved with calling makeDispList() earlier on, and it seems like
the depgraph already does a great job here. :)
Fixed an as of yet unreported bug, linked data objects which have materials
linked to object instead of data have to be exported as normal, they cannot
be instanciated, otherwise they will all share the same material.
parented linked data lamps made the export crash.
fix for two bugs reported by Diego Pino, an endian issue with vertex colors,
and the plugin code didn't export multiple colorbands correctly.
Updated the ortho camera export code for the new Blender ortho camera model.
- Made Blender.event var (previously only used by script links) hold ascii value -- where it applies -- of current event during events callback registered with Draw.Register(gui, events, button_events). Useful for gui scripts like Campbell's Python console. No problem using this var to hold the value, since in gui scripts it was not used (always None).
- Updated Window and Window.Theme with new theme vars and the Time space.
- Script links:
-- Added "Render" event for script links (runs twice, second time as "PostEvent", for clean-up actions). Now FrameChanged links don't run when a single pic is rendered.
-- Added "Enable Script Links" button in the script buttons tab. Now this bit gets saved in .blends along with the rest of G.f, so users can define per .blend if they are on or off by default. "blender -y" also disables all slinks as happened before with OnLoad ones only.
-- Other small changes in the script buttons tab:
When a link is added (button "new"), it becomes the active one for the window, no need to press a button to reach it.
Also, a pupmenu showing all available texts is shown when "new" is pressed, so users can choose a text w/o having to type. Cancel the popup to leave the string button empty (link exists, but has no script assigned). A pulldown would be better UI-wise, but it's kinda weird to show both scripts and normal texts (Blender doesn't differentiate them) in a script links pulldown. With a popup we can show only texts ending in ".py" (not done in this commit, need opinions) and if the script has no or another extension, case of many in old and current .blend's, there's still the string box for writing its name.
-- Implemented Ton's space handler script links:
Right now only for the 3d View, but it's trivial to add for others. There are two types: EVENT, to receive 3d View events from a chosen window and DRAW, to draw on the window. Ton's idea was to give scripts a controlled way to integrate better within Blender.
Here's how it works:
- scripts must have a proper header, like:
# SPACEHANDLER.VIEW3D.EVENT
and then they are shown in 3d View's View menu, "Space Handler Scripts" submenu. Check (mark, click on it) a script to make it active.
EVENT handlers should consult the Blender.event var to get the current event, which can be compared with values from the Draw module:
import Blender
from Blender import Draw
evt = Blender.event
if evt == Draw.AKEY:
print "a"
elif evt == Draw.LEFTMOUSE:
print "left mouse button"
else:
return # ignore, pass event back to Blender
Blender.event = None # tell Blender not to process itself the event
DRAW handlers are free to draw to their owner 3D View. OpenGL attributes and modelview and projection matrices are pushed before running the handler and poped when it finishes.
To communicate between EVENT and DRAW handler scripts we have the Blender.Registry module, as always.
Still need to code some nice example, which should also serve to test properly space handlers. Simple tests went fine.
- doc updates about the additions.
=======
Note: the UI part of the space handlers and script links is of course open for changes, I just tried to make it understandable. Probably we won't use the scriptlinks icon for "None Available" (check 3d View -> View -> Space Handler Scripts), though it hints at what space handlers are. The tooltips may not be accepted either, since other menus don't use them. Opinions welcomed.
Works as follows;
- press the 'show bake settings' button (no space left... :)
- define start/end frame for bake, and an interval step.
The baked result interpolates nicely (Bspline, 4 keys) so in general a
step size of 2 or 3 still gives OK results.
- Press "BAKE". This will do a full animation + playback. Press ESC if it
you don't want it.
Once Baked, the BAKE button becomes a FREE BAKE. As reminder the softbody
buttons get blocked with error() menu.
This saves OK in a file. Renders any frame, including fields and moblur.
You can also set a "Timeoffs" for the softbody. And yes, this should be
in the NLA once... :)
NOTE! With this commit, files saved with the old (first commit) version by
Jens Ole won't read the settings back... he stored all sofbody variables in
Object, which was moved to a new struct when I did my first commit on SB
(over a month ago)
Also note that I moved particle deflecting & softbody to a new include.
(Looks like big commit, but is mostly just change of API call!)
Particle emittors now can be parented to an armature Bone, and give the
correct path for each particle. Note that this doesn't work for deform!
And, for each particle the entire armature is evaluated, all actions and
NLA strips.
It used to work a little while BTW, but the code just called ALL armatures
and made ALL deforms again. Was quite slow... thats why the API call
change: do_all_actions() now accepts Object * to only do that one. With
a NULL it now does all still. Will disapppear in recode of course...
before it would follow subsurf code path by creating fake displistmesh,
etc... kinda fun for testing but just annoying now.
- change to creasing behavior, to make sure that with full creasing effect
is just simple subdivision.
