2022-09-06 Render & Cycles Meeting

Meetings
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Attendees

  • Brecht Van Lommel (Blender)
  • Thomas Dinges (Blender)
  • Christophe Hery (Meta)
  • Brian Savery (AMD)
  • Nikita Sirgienko (Intel)
  • Stefan Wener (Intel)
  • Patrick Mours (NVIDIA)
  • Michael Jones (Apple)

Notes

  • Blender 3.3 release:
    • oneAPI: improvement to fallback to host memory when out of GPU memory was added.
    • Metal: last minute fix for macOS 13 Beta render errors will be committed.
  • Open Shading Language: Patrick worked on GPU support, a patch will be submitted soon. OSL itself supports only CPU and OptiX currently, but oneAPI support is also under development, and hopefully more GPU backends will follow.
  • AMD HIP: ROCm 5.3 with Linux texture bug fix planned to be released soon, hardware ray-tracing is under development.
  • Path guiding: Sebastian is working on solving remaining to do’s, plan is to get this ready for Blender 3.4.
  • Many lights sampling: summer of code project is ending. There is still work to be done, Brecht plans to continue this and student also may be around later in the year.
  • Subsurface scattering: Christophe has a patch for taking into the IOR for the scattering direction. However one issue is that this may require another parameter to blend between diffuse and GGX transmission, since fully doing GGX may not be ideal in practice.
  • MNEE: Michael looked into supporting this on Metal. Increasing the register spilling limit in the driver will be one solution. Another would be to reduce spilling, by for example moving closures to global memory.

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.

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Will you be monitoring the Many Lights Sampling Feedback thread for bug reports and test scenes?

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:+1: Looking forward to a new build that will hopefully support GPU rendering of Path Guiding.

It would also be great if the Principled V2 builds and Path Guiding builds would be merged, so users can test the new Principled shader with Path Guiding.

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Yay for OSL to GPU support!!! :heart:

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I’m afraid that this won’t support GPU until Intel adds GPU support to OpenPGL, and AFAIK it’s not there yet

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