2021-08-03 Blender Rendering Meeting

MNEE and path guiding are complementary. I don’t know the details of the MNEE implementation being contributed, but there’s always newer papers that can be used to improve it.

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Cycles X: the main remaining work for feature completeness is in tiled rendering, which is under development by Sergey.

@sergey Any chance you’d be willing to do some tiled rendering on a Blender Developer’s YouTube livestream? The videos are always amazing and tiled rendering would be really interesting to learn more about. Seems to come up in forums/chat a bit so could be helpful to have something recorded.

Do I need to download the latest driver? Currently rdna does not support rocm

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There is no AMD GPU support in the cycles-x branch, it’s under development internally by AMD.

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So what about Ambient occlusion? Is it going to be a compositor-only effect? I don’t remember reading anything about its fate…

I think raytraced shaders (bevel and AO) were implemented already, am I wrong?

It’s already in. See ⚓ T87837 Cycles X - Restoring Features

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They are you’re right. But I mean AO in the world panel

Oh, ok, got it :slight_smile:

No idea about that to be honest.

I was asking because the claim is “feature completeness” and classic AO is not mentioned. Maybe it’s been discarded by design? Sounds strange to me since AO, although an old school lighting trick, is a common feature still used to “just a bit” enhance lighting. Imho anything that can be seen live on the viewport is better than having it post-render

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Yes, I get your point, but I don’t know the answer, I presume only @brecht can answer this :slight_smile:

(Hey glare and bloom! I’m talking to you!) :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

@brecht sorry to ask, but since OSL is not mentioned explicitly (regarding Cycles-X) - is Cycles-X will support OSL on the same level as Cycles? Especially interesting in raycasts, and object/geometry data querying (triangle verts, UVs/VCs/etc)

It should be supported on the same level, at least our OSL tests are passing in the cycles-x branch.

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It was intentionally removed, as it’s a Blender Internal feature that was only added for compatibility. Personally I think the fast GI options are a good replacement if you want old school AO lighting, and I’d rather not have two different AO mechanisms. It could be added back if there is really a need for it.

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Ok, nice to know.
I guess the fast GI feature is enough for the purpose of that “just a bit” I mentioned.
As I wrote somewhere thou, having the chance to use an override world for fast GI would be a huge help, giving the opportunity to mimic the full GI even with fast GI as low as 1 bounce
Edit: Maybe using an isDiffuse lightpath on the world shader would work just fine, still have to try this…

When will Apple GPU get supported?

Hello Community. Is there any Update from AMD on CyclesX. Now even regular blender 3.0 builds are broken.

When there is an update on Apple or AMD support it will be in the meeting notes.

Again on the matter of AO:
after a bit of experimentation I couldn’t find a nice solution that gives the desired result. The fact is that the current Fast AO takes the world as input, while the good’ol ambient occlusion is “additional light” from everywhere. I tried adding white background shader to the world shader via an isDiffuse (only adding for diffuse pass) to mimic AO behaviour, but it turns out that closed volumes (as interior renders) occlude the world lighting anyway, while plain AO just works also “from the inside”, as we are used to.
So, my 2 cents…: please bring back AO! :pray:

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