9d2fc97827
This was a bit complicated to do, but is working pretty well now, and can make shading significantly faster to render. This option pre-calculates self-shading information into a 3d voxel grid before rendering, then uses and interpolates that data during the main rendering phase, rather than calculating shading for each sample. It's an approximation and isn't as accurate as getting the lighting directly, but in many cases it looks very similar and renders much faster. The voxel grid covers the object's 3D screen-aligned bounding box so this may not be that useful for large volume regions like a big range of cloud cover, since you'll need a lot of resolution. The render time speaks for itself here: http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/vol_light_cache_interpolation.jpg The resolution is set in the volume panel - it's the resolution of one edge of the voxel grid. Keep in mind that the higher the resolution, the more memory needed, like in fluid sim. The memory requirements increase with the cube of the edge resolution so be careful. I might try and add a little memory calculator thing like fluid sim has there later. The voxels are interpolated using trilinear interpolation - here's a comparison image I made during testing: http://mke3.net/blender/devel/rendering/volumetrics/vol_light_cache_compare.jpg There might still be a couple of little tweaks I can do to improve the visual quality, I'll see.
Welcome to the fun world of open source. For instructions on building and installing Blender, please see the file named INSTALL. ---------------------.Blanguages and the .blender directory--------------------- The .blender directory holds various data files for Blender. In the 2.28a release those are the .Blanguages file containing a list of translations, the translations themselves and a default ttf font. Blender checks for the presence of this directory in several locations: - the current directory - your home directory - On OSX, the blender bundle is also checked - On Windows, the installation dir is checked. If you get a 'File ".Blanguages" not found' warning, try to copy the .blender dir to one of these locations (your home directory being recommended). -------------------------------------Links-------------------------------------- Getting Involved: http://www.blender.org/community/get-involved Community: http://www.blender.org/Community Main blender development site: http://www.blender.org The Blender project homepage: http://projects.blender.org/projects/bf-blender Documentation: http://www.blender.org/education-help Bug tracker: http://www.blender.org/development/report-a-bug Feature request tracker: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Requests