[Soc-2014-dev] Weekly Report #3 Cycles

[Thomas Dinges]

Hey,
here my report for the third week on Cycles optimizations: 
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:DingTo/GSoC_2014/Weekly_Reports/Week3

Best regards,
Thomas

== What I did this week ==
* I could speed up scenes without transparent shaders a bit, gives 3-4% 
improvement. This has been committed to Master already. (14be4b506ac8)

* I added 2 nodes to combine/separate vectors. This was on the official 
Cycles ToDo list, as the current workflow with RGB nodes seems a bit 
weird. (6a808b2b0bc4)

* Spend the majority of this week on research and coding of a QBVH in 
Cycles. https://developer.blender.org/D579 Committed WIP code to my 
branch. (590aae22a6cb) It helps in simpler scenes already (~7%), but is 
slower in more complex ones. I read Embree code, and I think we can use 
their Quad BVH code in Cycles. I still need some time to understand it 
well, but I think I can start porting code over from Embree step by step.

* Submitted initial code for the uchar3 attribute support in Cycles: 
https://developer.blender.org/D580

== Next week ==
Continue with uchar3 support and QBVH.

== Questions ==
None.