In this day and age, manual should be last resort, not the first one. The possibilities of UI these days are so vast and refined the reason to leave software to seek some external documentation should be a rare exception.
If you are learning UE4, then send me a PM. I can help you with any questions you have 
As a side note for everyone, do you think we should move this discussion about the Cycles-X branch of Blender to another thread?
It seems most of the discussion isnāt directly related to the topic of this thread? Not entirely sure really.
Hi @brecht ,
is it planned to also improve pixel filtering in cycles x? Having used other renderes in and outside of blender, cycles seems to be the only one that does not filter every sample. It looks as if it only affects object edges and areas with some contrast.
Also it only has any effect with at least two samples whereas other renderers already filter with only 1 sample.
Not that that would be of much use but that already gives a much smoother/filtered look than the current pixelnoise.
Cycles is using filter importance sampling, which in the end achieves the same goal but in a much more GPU friendly way.
See
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.183.3579&rep=rep1&type=pdf
for details.
Ah! So I was looking for weighted pixel sampling vs filter importance sampling.
Would be nice to put it in the docs maybe
Makes sense now. Danke Stefan! :
Iām also hesitating. The denoising topic is starting to dominate this general Cycles Requests thread, so itād be appreciated if you could wrap it up, or I can turn it into a dedicated thread if you want to continue the denoising discussion.
@YAFU @MetinSeven @LudvikKoutny @lsscpp @mib2berlin @SteffenD (Iām just tagging a bunch of people just so they know), Iāve created a new topic for the denoising discussion.
Thanks, Iāll move the relevant posts to that thread.
Meeeeee I would like that scene to test it. I love neoclassical :DD
By the way, that method is so nice. I always though that fireflies can be removed by image processing because it would be easy to make an algorithm to find the sudden white pixels in 2020 
I was wondering whether the Cycles architecture would for limiting the secondary effects of emissive surfaces to specific (or no) other elements in the scene. This isnāt entirely an out-of-nowhere request; there are renderers out there that permit emissive surfaces with exclusion lists, allowing for selective illumination. It allows for a number of effects that otherwise force the use of the compositor, with more awkward workflows in terms of keeping the scenes in-sync.
Is there a link to a list of the currently supported token for the Cycles stand alone renderer?
I have extracted what I can from the posted examples.
I am trying to rotate the world in the Cycles standalone renderer. When I supply values to the vector parameter I see no change in the outputā¦?
How do you rotate the world around the camera?
<background name="World">
<environment_texture name="hdri" filename="./maps/HDRI-Sunny.hdr" vector="90.0 0.0 0.0" />
<background name="bg" strength="1.0" color="1.0 1.0 1.0" />
<connect from="hdri color" to="bg color" />
<connect from="bg background" to="output surface" />
</background>Light linking, groups and Octane like displacement:
Octane and render man have light linking feature, which allows one to exclude certain meshes to not interact with a specific light source. Itās an absolute bomb of a feature especially for product rendering where sometimes you need a light source to only affect a certain object or want to exclude only one object or maybe a collection of objects. Apart from that, most other render engines also have light group feature which allows you to look at multiple lighting scenarios in the compositing phase. Octane happens to have this really amazing way of adding displacement without adding crazy amounts of geometry, since Cycles X is being written from the ground up, I thought these few things would be a nice addition to the engine. These tools are basic and I believe should be included in Cycles X when it finally comes out in October.
How does that displacement work ? (if not adding geometry)
I do not know, but if you check out octaneās displacement, it adds really fine details without the need to subdivide or add geometry.
This looks snappy as hell indeed. Wonder whatās their recipe. How can displacement work if not with mesh tesselation though ? (diagsplit et al) Do you think itās some parallax trick, like this one? (Parallax Occlusion Mapping)
I donāt think it could be parallax mapping as it doesnāt work with lower angles, yet here it works perfectly at all angles.I think they might just be using a very āsmartā subd mode, where octane adds geometry ONLY where needed to displace. Thatās the only thing I can think of. Whatever it is, itās real good.
Octaneās Texture Displacement seems to be some form of Voxel Rendering. From my limited understanding itās drawing a strand for every pixel in a texture with the appropriate displacement length. But itās mixed with something else. Itās extremely awesome, VERY fast and stable in animations.
Would be a killer feature if Cycles-X had it.
Hereās a sample (almost everything is Displacement):
This is the geometry in the Blender viewport:
Closeup:
Wow, impressive !!!
That looks very similar to Adaptive Subdivision (Adaptive Subdivision ā Blender Manual) in cycles.
