This patch adds a CMake option "WITH_CYCLES_DEBUG" which builds cycles with
a feature that allows debugging/selecting the direct-light sampling strategy.
The same option may later be used to add other debugging features that could
affect performance in release builds.
The three options are:
* Forward path tracing (e.g., via BSDF or phase function)
* Next-event estimation
* Multiple importance sampling combination of the previous two methods
Such a feature is useful for debugging light different sampling, evaluation,
and pdf methods (e.g., for light sources and BSDFs).
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13152
Introduce a packed_float3 type for smaller storage that is exactly 3
floats, instead of 4. For computation float3 is still used since it can
use SIMD instructions.
Ref T92212
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13243
This patch adapts the existing volumetric read/write lambda functions for Metal. Lambda expressions are not supported on MSL, so two new macros `VOLUME_READ_LAMBDA` and `VOLUME_WRITE_LAMBDA` have been defined with a default implementation which, on Metal, is overridden to use inline function objects.
This patch also removes the last remaining mention of the now-unused `ccl_addr_space`.
Ref T92212
Reviewed By: leesonw
Maniphest Tasks: T92212
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13234
We need to increase GPU memory usage a bit. Unfortunately we can't get away
with writing either reflection or transmission passes because these BSDFs may
scatter in either direction but still must be in a fixed reflection or
transmission category to match up with the color passes.
The issue was caused by splitting happening twice.
Fixed by checking for split flag which is assigned to the both states
during split.
The tricky part was to write catcher data at the moment of split: the
transparency and shadow catcher sample count is to be accumulated at
that point. Now it is happening in the `intersect_closest` kernel.
The downside is that render buffer is to be passed to the kernel, but
the benefit is that extra split bounce check is not needed now.
Had to move the passes write to shadow catcher header, since include
of `film/passes.h` causes all the fun of requirement to have BSDF
data structures available.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13177
This patch exposes the sampling offset option to Blender. It is located in the "Sampling > Advanced" panel.
For example, this can be useful to parallelize rendering and distribute different chunks of samples for each computer to render.
---
I also had to add this option to `RenderWork` and `RenderScheduler` classes so that the sample count in the status string can be calculated correctly.
Reviewed By: leesonw
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13086
Changes:
* After hitting a shadow catcher, re-initialize the volume stack taking
into account shadow catcher ray visibility. This ensures that volume objects
are included in the stack only if they are shadow catchers.
* If there is a volume to be shaded in front of the shadow catcher, the split
is now performed in the shade_volume kernel after volume shading is done.
* Previously the background pass behind a shadow catcher was done as part of
the regular path, now it is done as part of the shadow catcher path.
For a shadow catcher path with volumes and visible background, operations are
done in this order now:
* intersect_closest
* shade_volume
* shadow catcher split
* intersect_volume_stack
* shade_background
* shade_surface
The world volume is currently assumed to be CG, that is it does not exist in
the footage. We may consider adding an option to control this, or change the
default. With a volume object this control is already possible.
This includes refactoring to centralize the logic for next kernel scheduling
in intersect_closest.h.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D13093
We need to store the continuation probability used to make the termination
decision in intersect_closest, instead of recomputing it in shade_surface.
Because otherwise a shade_volume in between can change the throughput and
change the probability.
Remove prefix of filenames that is the same as the folder name. This used
to help when #includes were using individual files, but now they are always
relative to the cycles root directory and so the prefixes are redundant.
For patches and branches, git merge and rebase should be able to detect the
renames and move over code to the right file.
* Split render/ into scene/ and session/. The scene/ folder now contains the
scene and its nodes. The session/ folder contains the render session and
associated data structures like drivers and render buffers.
* Move top level kernel headers into new folders kernel/camera/, kernel/film/,
kernel/light/, kernel/sample/, kernel/util/
* Move integrator related kernel headers into kernel/integrator/
* Move OSL shaders from kernel/shaders/ to kernel/osl/shaders/
For patches and branches, git merge and rebase should be able to detect the
renames and move over code to the right file.
Add a Fast GI Method, either Replace for the existing behavior, or Add
to add ambient occlusion like the old world settings.
This replaces the old Ambient Occlusion settings in the world properties.
This triggered a compiler bug where it does not handle the sub.s16 PTX
instruction. Instead refactor the code so we don't need to do uint16_t
subtraction at all.
Also update OptiX device to remove the AO pass direct callable.
Thanks Patrick Mours for figuring this out.
Similar to main path compaction that happens before adding work tiles, this
compacts shadow paths before launching kernels that may add shadow paths.
Only do it when more than 50% of space is wasted.
It's not a clear win in all scenes, some are up to 1.5% slower. Likely caused
by different order of scheduling kernels having an unpredictable performance
impact. Still feels like compaction is just the right thing to avoid cases
where a few shadow paths can hold up a lot of main paths.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12944
Taking advantage of the new decoupled main and shadow paths. For CPU we
just store two nested structs in the integrator state, one for direct light
shadows and one for AO. For the GPU we restrict the number of shade surface
states to be executed based on available space in the shadow paths queue.
This also helps improve performance in benchmark scenes with an AO pass,
since it is no longer needed to use the shader raytracing kernel there,
which has worse performance.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12900
These transparent shadows can be expansive to evaluate. Especially on the
GPU they can lead to poor occupancy when only some pixels require many kernel
launches to trace and evaluate many layers of transparency.
Baked transparency allows tracing a single ray in many cases by accumulating
the throughput directly in the intersection program without recording hits
or evaluating shaders. Transparency is baked at curve vertices and
interpolated, for most shaders this will look practically the same as actual
shader evaluation.
Fixes T91428, performance regression with spring demo file due to transparent
hair, and makes it render significantly faster than Blender 2.93.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12880
The motivation for this is twofold. It improves performance (5-10% on most
benchmark scenes), and will help to bring back transparency support for the
ambient occlusion pass.
* Duplicate some members from the main path state in the shadow path state.
* Add shadow paths incrementally to the array similar to what we do for
the shadow catchers.
* For the scheduling, allow running shade surface and shade volume kernels
as long as there is enough space in the shadow paths array. If not, execute
shadow kernels until it is empty.
* Add IntegratorShadowState and ConstIntegratorShadowState typedefs that
can be different between CPU and GPU. For GPU both main and shadow paths
juse have an integer for SoA access. Bt with CPU it's a different pointer
type so we get type safety checks in code shared between CPU and GPU.
* For CPU, add a separate IntegratorShadowStateCPU struct embedded in
IntegratorShadowState.
* Update various functions to take the shadow state, and make SVM take either
type of state using templates.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12889
* Rename struct KernelGlobals to struct KernelGlobalsCPU
* Add KernelGlobals, IntegratorState and ConstIntegratorState typedefs
that every device can define in its own way.
* Remove INTEGRATOR_STATE_ARGS and INTEGRATOR_STATE_PASS macros and
replace with these new typedefs.
* Add explicit state argument to INTEGRATOR_STATE and similar macros
In preparation for decoupling main and shadow paths.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12888
This is the first of a sequence of changes to support compiling Cycles kernels as MSL (Metal Shading Language) in preparation for a Metal GPU device implementation.
MSL requires that all pointer types be declared with explicit address space attributes (device, thread, etc...). There is already precedent for this with Cycles' address space macros (ccl_global, ccl_private, etc...), therefore the first step of MSL-enablement is to apply these consistently. Line-for-line this represents the largest change required to enable MSL. Applying this change first will simplify future patches as well as offering the emergent benefit of enhanced descriptiveness.
The vast majority of deltas in this patch fall into one of two cases:
- Ensuring ccl_private is specified for thread-local pointer types
- Ensuring ccl_global is specified for device-wide pointer types
Additionally, the ccl_addr_space qualifier can be removed. Prior to Cycles X, ccl_addr_space was used as a context-dependent address space qualifier, but now it is either redundant (e.g. in struct typedefs), or can be replaced by ccl_global in the case of pointer types. Associated function variants (e.g. lcg_step_float_addrspace) are also redundant.
In cases where address space qualifiers are chained with "const", this patch places the address space qualifier first. The rationale for this is that the choice of address space is likely to have the greater impact on runtime performance and overall architecture.
The final part of this patch is the addition of a metal/compat.h header. This is partially complete and will be extended in future patches, paving the way for the full Metal implementation.
Ref T92212
Reviewed By: brecht
Maniphest Tasks: T92212
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12864
The assumption about absent shadow path was wrong.
The rest of the changes are to ensure shadow paths are finished prior
to the split, so that they write to the proper passes.
The issue was caught by running regression tests on OptiX.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12857
For details see the "Extending the Disney BRDF to a BSDF with Integrated
Subsurface Scattering" paper.
We split the diffuse BSDF into a lambertian and retro-reflection component.
The retro-reflection component is always handled as a BSDF, while the
lambertian component can be replaced by a BSSRDF.
For the BSSRDF case, we compute Fresnel separately at the entry and exit
points, which may have different normals. As the scattering radius decreases
this converges to the BSDF case.
A downside is that this increases noise for subsurface scattering in the
Principled BSDF, due to some samples going to the retro-reflection component.
However the previous logic (also in 2.93) was simple wrong, using a
non-sensical view direction vector at the exit point. We use an importance
sampling weight estimate for the retro-reflection to try to better balance
samples between the BSDF and BSSRDF.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12801
There is not enough time before the release to improve Random Walk to handle
all cases this was used for, so restore it for now.
Since there is no more path splitting in cycles-x, this can increase noise in
non-flat areas for the sample number of samples, though fewer rays will be traced
also. This is fundamentally a trade-off we made in the new design and why Random
Walk is a better fit. However the importance resampling we do now does help to
reduce noise.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12800
Only copy required part of volume stack instead of entire stack.
Solves time regression introduced by D12759 and avoids need in
implementing volume stack calculation to exactly match what the
path tracing will do (as well as potentially makes scenes with
a lot of volumes ans a tiny bit of deeply nested ones render
faster).
Still need to look into memory aspect of the regression, but
that is for separate patch.
Ref T92014
Maniphest Tasks: T92014
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12790
Previously the storage here was optimized to avoid indirections in BVH2
traversal. This helps improve performance a bit, but makes performance
and memory usage of Embree and OptiX BVHs a bit worse also. It also adds
code complexity in other parts of the code.
Now decouple triangle and curve primitive storage from BVH2.
* Reduced peak memory usage on all devices
* Bit better performance for OptiX and Embree
* Bit worse performance for CUDA
* Simplified code:
** Intersection.prim/object now matches ShaderData.prim/object
** No more offset manipulation for mesh displacement before a BVH is built
** Remove primitive packing code and flags for Embree and OptiX
** Curve segments are now stored in a KernelCurve struct
* Also happens to fix a bug in baking with incorrect prim/object
Fixes T91968, T91770, T91902
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12766
MSVC does not support variable size array definition.
Use maximum possible stack, similar to the GPU case.
Not expected to have user-measurable difference.
Make volume stack allocated conditionally, potentially based on the
actual nested level of objects in the scene.
Currently the nested level is estimated by number of volume objects.
This is a non-expensive check which is probably enough in practice
to get almost perfect memory usage and performance.
The conditional allocation is a bit tricky.
For the CPU we declare and define maximum possible volume stack,
because there are only that many integrator states on the CPU.
On the GPU we declare outer SoA to have all volume stack elements,
but only allocate actually needed ones. The actually used volume
stack size is passed as a pre-processor, which seems to be easiest
and fastest for the GPU state copy.
There seems to be no speed regression in the demo files on RTX6000.
Note that scenes with high nested level of volume will now be slower
but correct.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12759
Always sample background pass behind shadow catcher (if the pass
exists, of course), regardless of whether shadow catcher will be
used as approximate or accurate.
Allows to combine accurate shadows into an environment map.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D12747