[Bf-committers] Raytraced GI in Blender Internal?

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

Raytraced GI was never available in an official version of 2.5, that
must have been either a patch version or branch.

The main difficulty with merging render branch features is that it's
going to take up a lot time, that personally I'd rather spend
elsewhere. The render branch has many changes, where I tried to
refactor it into a bit more flexible architecture, so that e.g.
indirect light could be added. After working on this for more than a
year, my conclusion was that this was just too difficult. Many things
in the render branch are not stable, and some backwards compatibility
is broken as well. Now the problem is that it's not really possible to
merge over only raytraced GI, since it depends on many other changes.

I'd rather not commit deep changes in blender internal now, because it
inevitably needs much time to stabilize, get bugs fixed. Remember that
I already can only work on Cycles half time, because of code review,
bug fixing and other work that I get assigned. If someone else wants
to improve blender internal, they can, and I wouldn't expect it to
disappear soon.

Brecht.

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 5:56 PM, Konfuse Kitty <konfusekitty at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I've come here from the BlenderArtists forums with a couple of questions for Ton and other developers, regarding raytraced GI in Blender Internal.
>
> Forum member Blenderer started a thread on the subject, generating a lot of interest:
>
> http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?227982-I-miss-raytrace-rendering-with-indirect-lighting-(
>
> The basic premise of the discussion is that raytraced GI was available in early beta versions of 2.5, and some still use the betas specifically for this feature. At one bounce setting it works well enough, is comparatively very fast, and generally superior to the Approximate Indirect Lighting in the stable 2.5x releases.
>
> Another forum member, Ace Dragon, detailed quite a few reasons why the raytrace option may have been abandoned. However, the consensus is that most of the problems disappear when only one bounce is used. The fact that raytraced GI was used in Sintel has also been noted; many of us expected the same functionality in stable releases.
>
> Basically, we would really like to have raytraced GI back in Blender Internal. So we have two "burning questions" we would like to ask of Ton and other decision makers:
>
> 1. Will Blender Internal be kept as an option alongside Cycles? Many of us appreciate the optimised, biased nature of BI and would like it to remain.
> 2. If BI will be kept, what would it take to bring back raytraced GI, even if only at one bounce setting? If it's a matter of resources, money, we could try having a fundraising drive.
>
> I hope you can give this your considered response, and I will then copy the main points to the forum. Or feel free to post to the forum thread directly.
>
> Thank you for all your excellent work in Blender! :-)
>
> KonfuseKitty
>
>
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