[Bf-cycles] Optimization project

[David Black]

Hi Brecht,
Hope you had a nice holiday. Apologies for late response to requests, 
difficult last year and a half due to bereavement.

*Cycles optimization project:*
Previously you showed interested in one of my Viewport Cycles render 
acceleration ideas and mentioned about adding it to your list. Quick 
recap, the idea of a 'Quick' rendered (lighting / material preview) 
option, Viewport rendered at half resolution, scaled to fit the full 
area and possibly capped render settings, for example, 5 max bounces 
instead of 8. Having tried some tests, this provides quite a speed boost 
on high resolution displays. Is this something you are interested in, in 
connection with your optimization project?

Put together a little mock-up (see links below), sorry it's not very 
good. Ignore mini camera icons ((continuity test to see how it might 
look for new users, compared to current video style 'record' icon), "LV" 
letters indicate Live View, like on a real digital camera).

Time difference shown (in this case GPGPU renders) is the real time 
comparison, around 75% faster.
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/69638
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/69639

For speed compare, I halved the Viewport area and rendered the scene, 
then in Photoshop scaled the area back up to full size to see how it 
might look. As expected, noise is more noticeable but half resolution 
still seems adequate for very quick 'interactive' lighting previews 
while positioning lights in real time.

Interested to hear constructive feedback.
Thank you kindly for your time,

David
-- 

3d-designs-davidblack.blogspot.com 
<http://www.3d-designs-davidblack.blogspot.com>

On 05/02/2014 16:02, Brecht Van Lommel wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> With Gooseberry coming up, it would be good to start focusing on (CPU)
> optimization for the next few release cycles. For new features I still
> plan to finish volume rendering and add deformation motion blur soon,
> but besides that a more organized optimization project is something
> I'd like to spend time on.
>
> See this wiki page for more details:
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.6/Source/Render/Cycles/Optimization
>
> There's already great work being done by Sv. Lockal and others in this
> area, on the low level optimization front, but there's many more
> opportunities. I'll try to add more detail and ideas over time, this
> is just what I could think of off the top of my head.
>
> You can help out in various ways:
> * Contribute code to implement optimizations
> * Help gathering of test scenes representative of Gooseberry shots
> * Suggest practical optimizations ideas
>
> It would also be cool if someone could set up some webpage with a
> graph that tracks Cycles performance on test scenes over time, maybe
> doing a render with the latest Git version once a week or so (like
> http://arewefastyet.com/).
>
> Thanks,
> Brecht.
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-cycles mailing list
> Bf-cycles at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-cycles
>

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