[Bf-cycles] 2.66 plans

[Matthew Heimlich]

Brecht,

When you say your intention is to drop subdivision support, are you talking
about the auto-dicing that's been in experimental mode for a while? I'd be
in agreement with this, as even Arnold just uses the same "set subdivision
level" method that's been in Blender for ages. Any plans for an SSS shader
in the updated pipeline?


On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 8:48 PM, Brecht Van Lommel <
brechtvanlommel at pandora.be> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm still busy with bugfixing for 2.65 for a few weeks, but for 2.66
> I'm currently thinking about working on these features:
>
> * Displacement: finish true displacement / autobump
> * Combo BSDF / Ubershader: single node with diffuse, glossy,
> transparent for ease of use.
> * OSL: tiled image cache support, optimizations
> * Multiple importance sampling for lamps
>
> None of these are really big (although not so simple either), instead
> I'd like to focus on laying ground work for the releases after 2.66,
> refactoring code and working out designs. We can start preparing code
> and implementing some stuff, to then actually polish & enable it in
> one of the next releases.
>
>
> One big thing that will need work is our geometry / BVH code. We'll
> need to support more primitives: hair curves/lines, quads and maybe
> quad grids for more efficient storage of subdivision surfaces. All of
> those will then also need to support deformation motion blur
> eventually. And we'll also want to refactor our BVH code to better
> support SSE optimizations. These things add complexity and need
> refactoring in many places: our export code, BVH building and
> traversal and path tracing kernel. After the basics are there, for one
> of the next releases we can focus on finding efficient BVH building
> and ray intersection algorithms for hair and deformation motion blur,
> getting it work on GPU, and actually enabling the code.
>
> The other big one is volumetric rendering. I'll look at the volumetric
> rendering patch, and think about how it all fits our design, see how
> it fits in our path tracing kernel and maybe do some work there to get
> the volume rendering features extracted from the volume patch. In one
> of the next release we can then actually enable it and evaluate how to
> best do light sampling, and add support for voxel and point cloud
> textures.
>
> Also a note about the subdivision support in Cycles, my intention is
> to drop this. I think it's better to focus on trying to improve the
> modifiers in Blender and get efficient export, to avoid duplicating
> code. Our current subdivision code is only approximate, doesn't
> support triangles, creases and UV/color interpolation. The algorithms
> there I don't know how to extend well, better to look at OpenSubdiv
> for the Blender modifiers once.
>
> Thanks,
> Brecht.
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