[Bf-cycles] working around the Cuda 100 texture limit

[Jonatan Bijl]

Hi,

I was thinking of a way to circumvent the 100 texture limit imposed by Cuda, by automatically merging same-sized textures into a texture atlas. In the post http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?309902-Suggestion-for-workaround-for-cycles-texture-limit at blenderartists I posed the Idea, but I think this mailinglist is a better place for this kind of discussion.

I've taken a look into the code concerning image textures, but I don't know enough about the design of the cycles renderer to figure out the whole approach. Also, I have some concerns about whether this proposed approach is actually going to work. So I hope you guys might be able to help me answering that.
Here is (copied from my blenderartists post) the state of my idea:

Requirements for the solution

  *   amount of textures should not be the limit, only the size of your graphics memory
  *   typical UV tricks that are supported now (tiling textures, textures outside of [0,1] range) should be still supported
  *   solution should be transparent (invisible) to the user
Suggested approach

  *   before rendering starts, textures which have the same size and pixel-type are grouped together in an atlas.
  *   The concerned image nodes are notified that they have to re-map to an area of that atlas.
  *   When a node has to sample the texture, it will use the remapping info to sample the right area. border-cases should be handled correctly.
  *   When rendering a movie, the same atlas can be re-used for rendering the whole movie in this way.
Areas of concern

  *   The design of the node system will probably get more complicated: some manager needs to manage all the texture nodes
  *   performance - the re-mapping is not a difficult calculation, but will happen a lot (every time that one of the textures is sampled) so the code needs to be written with care
  *   limits - is there a limit to the texture sizes?
  *   Graphics pipeline features - does the cuda code use typical graphics-hardware features like mipmapping or texture border handling, which could be messed up when playing with the sampling coordinates?


Jonatan Bijl
Software Developer / 3D artist
T  +31 15 251 5669
M +31 6 4493 4295
E  jonatan.bijl at tba.nl
S  jonim8or

TBA
Karrepad 2a
2623AP Delft,
The Netherlands
www.tba.nl<http://www.tba.nl/>

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