[Bf-cycles] Status of Cycles in Tomato branch

[Thomas Dinges]

Hey everyone,
here some information and suggestions about the improvements and changes 
for Cycles in the soc-2011-tomato branch:

1) Overview of changes
-r48368: Final renderings (F12) are now tile based. (+some code cleanup 
and improvements for that in later revisions)
-r48822: Blended box mapping support for image texture node
-r49290: Fix for wrong resolution used for rendering Render Layer node
-r49396: Resolve Texture limits for CPU
-r49501: Experimental option to cancel rendering when doing initial 
synchronization

2) Tile rendering:
The new tile rendering works great and gives some good speed 
enhancements in some scenes, other scenes just render the same, and some 
are a bit slower (Although the amount of X/Y Tiles influences that speed 
as well)

I see 2 issues here which need to be resolved before this (otherwise 
good feature) can go to trunk:
-Rendering with CPU in 3D View only uses 1 CPU core.
-For F12 renders there should be an option to still do progressive 
rendering like before. This is useful for still images and tests, when 
someone can set the amount of samples to something high and then just 
abort it, when it looks good enough. This is currently already possible 
again, by setting X/Y tiles to 1x1, but in this case it also uses 1 CPU 
core only.

3) Other changes:
Blended Box Mapping and the Removal of the Texture limits on CPU look 
like good candidates for trunk, they are well tested by the Mango team 
and should not break anything. The other changes probably need some more 
testing, maybe Sergey knows more here.

Best regards,
Thomas