[Soc-2016-dev] Weekly Report #04, Cycles Images

[Thomas Dinges]

Hi,
as always please read my report in the wiki for better formatting and links.
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:DingTo/GSoC_2016/Weekly_Reports/Week4

= Week 4 =

== What I did this week ==

==== Half Textures ====

I am not finished with the half project, but made some progress and 
merged parts to master.

* Further work on half float in my branch, in preparation for GPU 
support and float4 to half4 buffer conversions.

* Merged half float infrastructure and support for OpenEXR Half Float to 
master. This way people can already save 1/2 of the memory for HDRs and 
Normalmaps.

==== Memory Statistics ====
I started to think about my next goal, improved memory statistics. 
Before I can start on this one, some questions need to be answered.

* Where do we want these statistics inside of Blenders UI? We don't 
really have a dedicated logging window, where we can put information. 
Some ideas:
** Properties Editor: Have a Statistics panel with info in the Render 
settings. Probably the easiest solution, but maybe the space isn't 
enough for all the infos.
** Have a dedicated Logging window in Blender? We could use the Info 
Editor space, that one is not used afaik, and we have enough screen 
space there to put nice statistics.

* What exactly should be shown?
** I imagine data such as total memory usage (size of all the data that 
gets uploaded to device), as well as detailed information about which 
parts of the scene take up the biggest portion of memory (Textures, 
Geometry...).
** In addition to that, we can have an option like "Try to improve 
memory usage, at the potential cost of some accuracy". This would e.g. 
place textures in half texture slots. We shouldn't do this 
automatically, unless we are sure, that we don't cut the data range, so 
an option here seems a possible alternative to that.

== Next week ==
* Hopefully finally finish half float. I need to make GPU work and add 
support for float4 to half4 data conversion, so we can e.g. place Smoke 
Data or Vertex Normals into half storage, and benefit from even further 
memory savings.

* Talk with UI developers about logging inside of Blenders UI.

== Questions ==
None.

Best regards,
Thomas