2021-06-08 Blender Rendering Meeting

Attendees

  • Brecht Van Lommel (Blender)
  • Jeroen Bakker (Blender)
  • Kévin Dietrich (Blender)
  • Patrick Mours (NVIDIA)
  • Brian Savery (AMD)
  • Juan Gea Rodriguez

Notes

Cycles

  • Cycles X: shader ray tracing and (incomplete) baking support was added back by Brecht. Next is initial homogenous volume rendering support. Sergey works on render passes, for shadow catcher compositing and denoising of multiple render passes.
  • AMD work on Cycles X support is progressing, will setup a meeting to discuss the implementation details.
  • OpenImageDenoise is being upgraded to 1.4.0. Libraries for the various platform are in the process of being committed, after that further changes will be needed to fully take advantage of new features.
  • With the Blender 3.0 release becoming a longer release cycle, there’s a chance Cycles X will be part of that instead of 3.1. That also means point cloud rendering will likely be committed to the cycles-x branch instead of master.
  • Stefan merged the 2.93 changes into the Cycles standalone repository.

Eevee & Viewport

  • Clément shared details on Eevee development for 3.0 and beyond in a blog post.
  • Jeroen works on optimization of CPU to GPU transfer of meshes and related updates, by multithreading more steps.
  • Kévin pushed a subdivision_work branch with his initial implementation of GPU accelerated OpenSubdiv. Still not faster than CPU since it lacks caching. Rather than adding a new batch backend for meshes, the design was changed to extend the existing mesh backend with more data. A compute shader will also need to be added for refinement on the GPU.

Practical Info

This is a weekly video chat meeting for planning and discussion of Blender rendering development. Any contributor (developer, UI/UX designer, writer, …) working on rendering in Blender is welcome to join and add proposed items to the agenda.

For users and other interested parties, we ask to read the meeting notes instead so that the meeting can remain focused.

  • Agenda
  • Google Meet
  • Time: Tuesday 5 to 6 PM Amsterdam Time
  • Next Meeting: June 15, 2021
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I got the dates wrong for this and the next meeting today, corrected now.