Cycles for Gaffer

Very cool project, I’m leaving a comment here so I can keep up with your development. I imagine this sort of thing will be useful for studios to use on large projects.

1 Like

Hey all,

I’ve been continuing to make builds and I’m getting close to feature-completion each time. Thank you for making standalone mirror Blender 2.8! It is making it so much easier to bring over 2.81 updates and custom branches for testing. The next build will be 0.9.0 which is a lot more stable (putting scene mutexes in various places really helped, ha!)

One thing that I am stuck on right now is how to make geometry turn into volumes. From Blender it looks like you just attach a volume shader without a surface shader and it should “just work” but perhaps I am missing something. I have a ‘cclOutput’ shader which is the Material output node with just the volume shader attached there. Looking at the blender addon code there doesn’t seem to be anything obvious that I am missing that I can see, any hints here would be great! That goes for displacement too which doesn’t seem to function, perhaps there’s a special mark update call that I need to make sure to call on those changes…

Cheers

2 Likes

I am cleaning up this GSoC branch for VDB volumes onto the latest Cycles:
https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/history/soc-2018-cycles-volumes/intern/cycles/
To here:

Not quite there yet, I think I am still having issues assigning volume shaders, so if anyone can advise me on what to look for under the hood, that would be great! (The debugger is registering that there is a volume shader assigned).

Cheers

6 Likes

Hey there - I’ve been exploring your implementation of cycles for gaffer. I’m new to both and one of the things I’m having difficulty with is getting my geo to subdivide at render time. I haven’t been able to find any means of doing this. Do you (or anyone else) know of a way to do this?

Hey,
Add meshType node to change the type to subdivision surface, use cyclesAttributes node to adjust the subdivison settings and switch the feature set to experimental in the cyclesOptions node
Only adaptive subdivision is now supported I think, no uniform.

2 Likes

Thank you! However - I don’t see any controls for determining how the uv’s are smoothed. Is that not an option yet?

While I’ve got your attention - I don’t suppose you know how to get a regular bucket render out of cycles in gaffer, do you? I’ve found the cyclesRender node, but I’m not sure what to do with what that outputs (the dispatch folders and file).

Hey fbb,

Kubo has been stress-testing it for me and what he’s put is correct, hopefully uniform subdivision will come in in a Cycles update, otherwise I’ll need to implement it myself (Blender subdivides and passes it to Cycles for uniform). Adaptive works fine as long as you follow those steps. UV subdivision is an option in Blender I’d imagine, so the same story there (there isn’t any option in Gaffer yet).

For tile rendering, you just need to untick progressive refine, batch rendering will default to this anyway, only interactive renders don’t.

Cheers and enjoy, feel free to put bug reports in the issues section of the github repo.

1 Like

Woaw !!! Great your put Cycles in Gaffer !!! Thank you !!! I’ll try it !!!