テンプレート:Release Notes/2.46/Rendering/Renderer Improvements

Ton Roosendaal

Blender Play feature:

- Hold shift prints filename/frame nr + speed - SHIFT+NumPad-4: playback speed 24 frs/sec

Render feature: the END OF DIFFUSE BANDING! http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/rendering-features/

Thanks Andy for poking and analysing, and Nathan for feedback!

And there's another annoyance I got poked for:

Image texture "Filter size" was not well usable for making the appearance soft filtered, this because it multiplied the sample values, and such values could be extreme small.

Added next to "Filter" buton a new "Min" option, which enforces a filter size to be a minimum of 'filter' pixels in size.

Adding the colorband Hue, Saturation, Value, Color blending modes to the Material Texture blending as well.

Feature + Fix:

- while sampling color in image window, you now get the sampled color as a line drawn in the node editor Curve nodes, allowing quicker view of what values you actually change.

- reverted temporary the patch [#6779] by Matthew Plough

 He replaced image drawing of backdrop-node-editor with our Texture drawing
 function. That call is extremely slow, and should be by definition slower
 than glDrawPixels (unless you don't upload the image each time to gfx mem).

 Drawing large frames (2k, 4k) in node editor became unacceptable slow, even 
 with the neatest hardware around. (tested nvidia, ati) 

 Probably (Campbell thinks) this is a bypass for Linux ATI cards? 
 Anyhoo, this should be investigated further before applying. It better then
 becomes a user pref, or even much better: part of the OpenGL profiler we need.

Small feature: add a group -> object name gets derived from group name,

Render control feature: shader-level shadowbuffer bias

Lampbuffers require painful bias tweaking (to prevent aliasing or to get shadow detail). Sometimes you want this different per object, like for gras you want less shadow detail, but for the ground you want high detail. This feature allows to tweak it.

The new "LBias" slider is in shader panel, bottom. Ugly! But, thats for later...

Added new render pass: "Mist". This is actually just the alpha value as currently being calculated by the mist code. It is in many cases not very useful to have this as alpha in shading result, also for postprocess and composite.

Note: this pass also works with "Mist" not set in World, of course.

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Vector Blur now has option to be curved!

Especially for fast moving objects (as we have here in Peach) the art department demanded nice curved vector blur. This formula uses a quadratic bezier function, which is not giving perfect circles, but certainly useful results.

Also on todo: get this blur code to do nicer accumulation...

Phase one of better masking support while rendering.

Problem: artist wants character to walk in grass, but still have all rendered in seperate render-layers, for postpro effects and vblur. How to efficiently create a mask image you can put *over* the character for the grass?

Solution has two parts; this commits allows any layer inside of the renderlayers to become a Z-mask (Z values for solid gets filled in, but not rendered).

Second part of commit is render option "Only render stuff that's in front of a zbuffer value that was filled in (saves render time)

Feature: we're using "non linear lighting" now, using exposure/range in world. That allows more extreme lamps (areas too).

To make it work more intuitive, the preview renders in buttons now use the settings for exposure too.

New feature: Zmask rendering

It's quite a complex feature for simple log, so here's the log as it should be, with images:

http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/rendering-features/

Improvements in Zmask feature of yesterday:

- zmask now allows to have solid faces included too - ctrl+click on render-layer layers (whats in a name!) now works better

Here's the revised and extended doc:

http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/rendering-features/

It's a difficult to explain feature... but important for a good compo pipeline here. Being tested still!

New rendering option: FSA!

This completes the pipeline make-over, as started in 2006. With this option, during rendering, each sample for every layer and pass is being saved on disk (looks like non-antialiased images). Then the composite and color correction happens, then a clip to 0-1 range, and only in end all samples get combined - using sampling filters such as gauss/mitch/catmul.

This results in artefact-free antialiased images. Even Z-combine or ID masks now work perfect for it!

This is an unfinished commit btw; Brecht will finish this for strands. Also Halo doesnt work yet.

To activate FSA: press "Save Buffers" and the new button next to it. :)

Press Rkey in compositor for reading back render results and invoke a compo. This now correctly reads AO (skipped it sometimes) and it makes a correct composite.

Feature: SHIFT+R in compositor reloads all full sample buffers, composites and merges with filter. (ALso in Node menu).

AlphaOver node feature: "Premul" slider allows to mix between the using alpha as premul or nonpremul. Quite useful for brightness tweaks.

When iserting rotations in poses, the quaternion sometimes rotates exactly the opposite way as you want. Or even worse, you can never really define which way it rotates (officially it should do shortest path).

This hotkey flips the quaternion (which means it rotates to same position exactly via the other way). Hotkey ALT+F (flip) in 3d window posemode.

Italian community request: Area light fix!

http://peach.blender.org/index.php/area-light-fix-light-not-shadow/

Now, for every possible shadow sample, an area light calculation is done from that position.

Sequencer - remap path

Sequence Editor: SHIFT+R, Remap Paths (also in pull down menu)

This allows to remap the root of a path to another directory. Works on all selected Image strips. That way you can make absolute paths relative, for example.

Example: original path: /mnt/orange/finals/06_which_way/06_03b/ to be remapped: /mnt/orange/finals/ remap to: // new path: //06_which_way/06_03b/

New feature:

Weightpaint drawing now allows to define your own range of colors; using a ColorBand, available in the User settings.

Log: http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-244/animation-features/

New driver option for the poor suffering riggers:

"Rotation Difference"

This option, for Bones, allows the angle between two Bones to be the driver for another Ipo channel. This angle now is hardcoded based on the Bone-space orientation (without parenting rotation).

Thanks to nathan for poking and test!

A different approach for the new driver option: it now uses pose-space instead of bone-space. This makes it visual easier to use. For the todo: a large array of buttons for users to pick what kind of 'space' is used?

Quick added feature: the "do not get scaling from parent bone" option.

It's next to the 'hinge' button, a small 'S'. No more space here... will make it nicer inferface later. :) Let's first see if this works as expected.

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Feature: transform manipulator (align normal option) aligns with bezier handles now. Needed & useful for modeling trees here...

Small feature added to new "show bone paths around cfra": - after a insert-key (autokey mode) it updates paths.

Long outstanding feature request: "Multi Modifier"

This allows to mix between the result of 2 modifiers, with both using the same input state. This is useful for having a mesh deform and armature deform working together.

However! This functionality could have been presented better... this is actually Node editor stuff!

Now it works by adding a "MM" button, next to the "overall vgroup" option. If MM is pressed, the input of this modifier is the same as the input of the previous modifier. Only the armature modifier has this option now...

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Revamp of multi modifier option!

- error fix: overall weight group value was used inverted - added "Inv" button to make weight group work inverted - added bigger, more clear Multi Modifier button