[Soc-2018-dev] Weekly Report #3 - Further Development for Cycles' Volume Rendering

[Geraldine Chua]

Wiki link:
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Geraldine/GSoC_2018/Reports#Week_3

While progress is slower than I'd like, I have added a working
implementation of the tiling algorithm and some examples here (
https://developer.blender.org/T55264) (there are actually 2 very obvious
typos in *render/image.cpp* that I accidentally committed, will fix them in
the next commit).

As in the task comments, memory usage savings depend on the threshold,
though even with the lowest possible threshold value, the sample image's
memory usage was already reduced by ~33%. Later on it may be possible to
make this value user changeable.

*To-do next week*

* Modify sparse tiles to support generic types (currently only supports
float4, should be fine as long they have a > operator overloaded).

* Add support for all Volume attributes (currently only supports color).

* Change detection method for calling sparse grid creation (currently, a
new ImageDataType was created, but will probably change this to a bool
member of Image).

* Make this compatible with the Mesh Volume speedup (
https://developer.blender.org/D3038). Because of they are currently
mutually exclusive, using this implemntation will actually slow down
rendering.

* Implement lookup for tricubic interpolation (currently just throws an
assert if a compressed texture tries to call it).

* Add support for CUDA and OpenCL (this may actually not be tested soon
since I won't have access to a PC with a compatible GPU for another couple
of weeks).

All of these should be completed by the end of week 4.

*Potential to-dos*

* Create a wrapper class for device_memory's of SparseTiles.

* Support 2D tiling.

* Make threshold value a user-inputted value.

* Remove the SparseTile struct altogether and just treat tiles abstractly.
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