Cycles Requests

I guess this discussion about licensing must have come up before on https://opensource.stackexchange.com.
Please keep the thread on-topic. Create a new one to discuss this, and link that here.

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couple of points there

  1. That was my personal opinion, this is in no way / shape / form the stance of the blender project as a whole
  2. Always lovely when people post a private conversation without asking, while you are naturally free to do so, it is very likely I will be much less engaging in future conversations with you.
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I’ve split the GPL license discussion to a separate thread.

Feel free to continue the discussion there, as long as you keep it respectful. Thanks.

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Well, in forums more and more users are wondering how it would be possible to speed up OptiX denoiser’s work in transparent areas.
Adaptive Sampling solved the problem for render in transparent areas. Could it be possible that somehow OptiX denoiser could do something similar to what Adaptive Sampling does in transparent tiles to speed up the work?

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Is performance overhead of the OptiX denoiser a significant issue? It has not seemed to be for me. Is it slower on cards that do not have tensor cores?

Also, I believe the OptiX denoiser is essentially a black box in the graphics driver the Cycles hands image sections to and gets back denoised versions, so not sure there’s much the Blender/Cycles devs could do. (except maybe identify empty tiles and skip denoising them entirely?)

So, as for my Cycles Clip Geo node suggestion it seems even Octane is adding it in the next release 2021:

OTOY • OctaneRender 2021™ Preview is here!

I still think this is a neat feature and it will be hopefully added at some point :slight_smile:

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Raytracing-based Bools would be cool indeed.
In the meantime I was partially successful accomplishing something like this with a shader. Plenty of breaking instances so it’s far from perfect, but for the simplest cases it might work for you:

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Probably I’m too lazy to figure out for myself: what are the conveniences over the regular boolean modifier? Or I should say, a node-modifiers enpowered boolean operation?

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The advantages of Booleans at rendertime that I can think of are:

  1. Your scene is not bogged down by Boolean modifier operations being (re)calculated.

  2. Very complex high-polygon Booleans might be enabled by this.

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That’s an interresting idea - I just tried it, but I don’t see any straightforward way to correctly bend geometry without a node setup that is too complex to be user friendly. Maybe there could be a dedicated Node for this kind of deformation. Also - if you want deformation for the individual branches, that would become horribly complex probably.

Edit: Just noticed you meant modifiers and not nodes - but I think the same usability problems occur there.

Nice work, the only problem is that cycles don’t allow variable displacement per instance, so this kind of animation wouldn’t work on forests from particles for example, where a procedural noise with texture coordinate + from instance option influencing the deformation intensity could give some truly amazing wind effects variations.

Sad that it’s not possible to do that, in the example below i clearly vary my x/y direction but the same direction applies to all instances

Please correct me if i’m wrong?

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for 1. I hope that some “cache node” will eventually land in modifiers, as many are asking here and there.
for 2. also I hope that modifier nodes will get the job done, considering also the recently implemented “exact” booleans algorithm

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I’d love to see micro-roughness added to Cycles:

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The VShade material addon has Micro-Roughness implemented in its nodes.

https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/scripts-plugins/rendering/vshade-professional-shader-system-for-blender

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But you already posted that, here?

Hi,Happy New Year to all
Is it possible to have separate node
for Cycles native non-local means denoiser in Composer?

Hey. I would love to ask whether cycles will ever get something like bi directional ray tracing or something like multiple important sampling or manifold exploration. I don’t code so I don’t know the limitations or the difficulty of this request. But from what I’ve seen and the amount of improvements this brings makes me wonder if it ever had the chance to become a reality in blender. And I already seem to have multiple uses for this feature. Anyways this is beyond my knowledge so I would just like to thanks the developers no matter the case because they did an absolutely jaw dropping job with what they have. (idk if someone else asked this question)

Hi George,

Here’s an informative post about this subject by @lukasstockner97, one of the Cycles developers:

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That’s a technique to combine different sampling strategies and it’s in use all over Cycles already. For instance here:
image
That’s what “Multiple Importance” does.

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hey, thanks for the useful reply. But i think bi-directional rendering can be used for more than just caustics and speed. for eg. if I have a ball with subsurface scattering enabled and I have a light inside the ball no change would happen to the ball on the outside. it would look like a normal ball. But I think with bi- directional it could detect a light inside the ball and show the ball being illuminated from the inside. This also enables the ability to create physically accurate lens flares which is always a plus (i know that lens flares are caustics aswell) but I think the uses of bi-directional rendering alone is a massive plus. I’m sorry if I sound annoying because apparently this feature/request has been asked multiple times before, but I do think that blender would be better with this feature. Again, I am sorry if there’s something that I’m completely missing.

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if I have a ball with subsurface scattering enabled and I have a light inside the ball no change would happen to the ball on the outside.

That’s a limitation of the shortcuts in the SSS algorithm, not forward-only path tracing… Use a volume shader or give the ball thickness (ex, with a solidify modifier) and this will work fine in current Cycles.

Bidir is almost never used in production rendering because it tends to cause more problems than it solves. And most of the problems it solves are things that are easily cheated around anyway (ex, doing lens flares in post). Read Lukas’ post again, particularly this bit:

It’s not a question of how hard some algorithm is - I could easily implement a basic form of this, or SPPM, or VCM, or whatever in Cycles in a week or so. The problem is that Cycles is a production renderer, and that comes with expectations.

Everything we include has to work with live preview rendering, GPU rendering, ray visibility options, arbitrary surface materials, arbitrary light materials, volumetrics, DoF and motion blur, tiled rendering, denoising and so on - that’s not even close to the full list. Every single point I mentioned above is a complication/challenge when implementing VCM, for example.

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