Dev:Ref/Release Notes/2.69/Cycles

Blender 2.69: Cycles

Improved Subsurface Scattering (head by ten24)

Subsurface Scattering

• Bump mapping is now supported.
• New Texture Blur input controls how much of the color texture is blurred.
• New falloff functions and sampling algorithm, see documentation. (r59236)
• Direct, Indirect and Color render passes are now available for SSS. (r58858)

Hair

• The hair settings have been simplified in the UI and the user doesn't need to enable the "Experimental" feature set any more. (r59234, r60169)
• A new hair BSDF node, with two closure options was added. These closures allow the generation of the reflective and transmission components of hair. The node allows control of the highlight colour, roughness and angular shift. (r60151)

CUDA

• The Branched Path Trace integrator (Non-Progressive integrator) is now available on the GPU. (r59034)

Improved sky model

Sky Model

• The Hosek / Wilkie Sky model has been added to Cycles, which gives more natural results, especially for sunsets and sunrise. (r59603)

Using color temperature (Blackbody node) to accurately light a scene

Nodes

• A Ray Depth (current bounce) info can now be retrieved from the Light path node, to limit shaders or lights to e.g direct lighting. (r58776)

• Added a Blackbody node to convert a temperature in Kelvin to an RGB color. This can be used e.g. for lights, to easily find the right color temperature. (r58780)

• New Vector Transform node, to convert a vector, point or normal between World <=> Object <=> Camera coordinate space. (r58781)

• Combine / Separate HSV nodes are now available in Cycles as well. (r58782)

• The Mapping node now has an option to define what kind of vector the mapping is being applied to. There are option to specify if it's a Texture, Point, Vector or Normal. Point is the previous behavior, Texture is the new default, where rather than the texture coordinate, the texture is transformed, which may be more intuitive. (r60371)

Film Response

Usability

• Progressive / Non-Progressive integrator have been renamed to Path Trace / Branched Path Trace. (r59423)
• Presets are now available inside the Sampling panel. Also added Total Samples amount info. (r58429, r59391)
• Add a "Square Samples" option to the Sampling panel, to use squared values for ease of use. This can make tweaking easier from an artist point of view. (r58424)

Tone Mapping

• Color management settings are now used for 3D viewport rendering. RGB curve mapping however is not supported yet. This feature requires a modern graphics card with GLSL support.
• Measured film response data is now also available as "Looks", to emulate photographic film from Agfa and Kodak. The option can be found in Color Management panel under Scene tab in the properties editor.