Dev:Ref/Release Notes/2.67/Cycles

Blender 2.67: Cycles

Subsurface Scattering

Support for subsurface scattering has been added, for materials such as skin, wax, marble, milk and others. For these materials, rather than light being reflect directly off the surface, it will penetrate the surface and bounce around internally before getting absorbed or leaving the surface at a nearby point. (r55708)

How far the color scatters on average can configured per RGB color channel. For example for skin red colors will scatter further which gives distinctive red colored shadows, and a soft appearance.

The implementation is still quite basic and will be improved in following releases. It only works on the CPU for now.

Hair

Support for Minimum Pixel Size was added. (r56072)

It works best with ribbon primitives and a preset for these is included. Strands that are further away will be made wider, which is compensated with transparency to keep the look similar. This effect is only applied for camera rays.

The strand width settings are also changed, so that the particle size is not included in the width calculation. Instead there is a separate particle system parameter for width scaling.

Optimizations

• Scenes without Motion Blur or Hair render a bit faster, due to de-duplication of the various BVH traversal variations. (r56118)
• Fixed some cases of uninitialized memory in OSL, which could cause bad texture filtering artefacts or performance. (r56492)
• Remove unused mix shader input in case the factor is 0.0 or 1.0 and not connected to another input node. (r55681)

Usability

• When render layers have per layer number of samples set, the Sampling panel now has an option to specify how to use them. (r56096)
  • Use: render layer samples override scene samples
  • Bounded: bound render layer samples by scene samples
  • Ignore: ignore render layer sample settings

GPU rendering

Official builds don't come with support for Geforce 2xx and 3xx cards (computing capability 1.3) anymore. (r54706)