GafferCycles 0.24.0

Major Release

• Cycles X (well, now the Cycles that comes with 3.1 as of December patches) see the release notes here: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.0/Cycles and https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.1/Cycles
• Updated the API calls to what 2.93 Cycles brought in, which was a major refactor
• Added lightgroups and corner normals patches in this release which are both not applied to mainline Cycles yet
• OpenCL was removed, but HIP for AMD hardware is now in-place and compiled in this release for RDNA/RDNA2 hardware
• CUDA 11.5.1 and OptiX 7.4.0 were used in this build
• OpenImageDenoise 1.4.2
• NanoVDB (top-of-tree) with HIP support
• OSL is now default but still not supported by GPU backends so you need to specify SVM manually
• Proper point-clouds were introduced into Cycles and are supported

Improvements

• Rewrote how images get saved out, uses OpenImageIO directly via the new output driver interface
• Object lifetime is now managed mostly by Cycles itself as per the API changes, creation is still initially made by Gaffer so it stays multi-threaded without locks, but the final add is deferred to the Cycles scene lock as well as deletion which is managed by Cycles
• Shader creation vastly improved with fixes to the hashing and custom AOVs should support shader substitutions
• OSL shaders can be mixed and matched with Cycles shaders
• Specifying device or multiple ones is vastly different, it is designed to specify via the right-click presets (please see tool-tip for details)

Breaking Changes

• The Output shader node is now removed, it is now required to apply Surface/Volume/Displacement as separate ShaderAssignments and to use CyclesAttributes to apply the "shader" parameters to the scene path. This opens up upcoming better USDShade support as well as making it easy to remove displacement while retaining surface
• Enums on shaders were integers before, but this is very problematic as they change over time so now they are StringData and converted to their integer number internally
• Cycles removed branched-path mode, so no more sampling options for individual light paths or on lights. It is implied that adaptive sampling and AI denoising should be used now to reduce and manage noise

TODO

• Support scrambling distance
• Unit tests
• Documentation

GafferCycles 0.22.1

Bugfix release

• Fixed major regression where interactive render wouldn't update (due to the early-out camera test, it wouldn't update the camera properly if the scene did change)
• Possible fix for denoise options to work on different but compatible devices eg. CPU render + OptiX denoise. Needs testing as I don't have an Nvidia GPU handy right now

GafferCycles 0.22.0

Latest Cycles from Blender 2.90: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.90/Cycles

New in GafferCycles 0.22.0

• Denoising in interactive rendering (both OpenImageDenoise and Optix Denoise as options where supported)
• Message logs in the GUI following: https://blog.gafferhq.org/?p=822
• Automatically revert to OSL-mode when a shader is detected in the scene instead of crashing if OSL shading system is not set
• Pause/resume finally works! Needed patching in Cycles code to the unique way Gaffer uses the renderer
• Cycles shaders output to OSL input will work once Gaffer updates: GafferHQ/gaffer#3904
• Hair settings greatly reduced due to the changes in Cycles
• Some camera update cleanups, might prevent some crashes
• Mesh-lights now will act more like a light in the scene UI (area-light preview textures and a proper IES light todo)
• Some scene-view inspector defaults set: https://blog.gafferhq.org/?p=785

GafferCycles 0.21.0

Latest Cycles as of 30/5/2020 https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.83/Cycles

New in GafferCycles 0.21.0

• Fixed bugs in attribute conversions
• Cryptomatte is rendering again, needed to do changes from Cycles upstream changes
• Both interactive and batch mode defaults to path tracer mode, branched path must be explicitly set
• AA samples for branched now defaults to 1 so it's not just black
• Size parameter was missing on point lights

GafferCycles 0.20.1

Latest Cycles as of 23/4/2020 https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.83/Cycles

New in GafferCycles 0.20.0

• Added a way to tag using either a constant or uniform boolean primitive variable "_smooth" to set smooth/hard normals.
• Stress-tested the "Old Attic Interior Scene" from https://developer.nvidia.com/usd which found differently named UVs, so there is more robust code to try to detect the main UV of a model

GafferCycles 0.19.0

Latest Cycles as of 27/3/2020 https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.83/Cycles

New in GafferCycles 0.19.0

• OpenVDB support, it is now in mainline Cycles
• Massive revamp on how a scene gets updated, it should be more efficient especially when it is only the camera moving
• Adaptive sampling is now in the main branch and isn't experimental anymore
• Updating GafferCycles to support the Cycles changes found in 2.83

GafferCycles 0.18.2

Fixes to auto-generating normals if they are missing and a normal map is needed. Adaptive subdivision however doesn't work with normal maps: https://developer.blender.org/T49159

GafferCycles 0.18.1

This is to support the latest Gaffer 0.56.x.x series.

GafferCycles 0.18.0

Latest Cycles as of 31/1/2020 https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.82/Cycles

New in GafferCycles 0.18.0

• Adding MikkTspace so that tangents get generated when needed (eg. for normal maps)

• Dupli-generated & Dupli-UV added as Gaffer attributes for offsetting in a texture_coordinate shader or from a uv_map shader on instances

• Some spinlocks removed in favour of concurrent containers from TBB

Bugfixes

• Fixed transform and deformation blur.

• Prevent crashing when VDBs are in the scene (VDBs are not supported in these builds)

GafferCycles 0.17.0

Latest Cycles as of 31/1/2020 https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.82/Cycles

New in GafferCycles 0.17.0

• Creases support on subdivision models
• Added GafferBot example
• Camera panorama support as well as a way to set arbitrary parameters via a CameraTweaks node

Fixes

• Revamped primitive variables conversion which fixes some corner-cases with some assets eg. Pixar's kitchen set
• Devices are now wrangled in one area of the code and shared, Cycles tends to return different data about the devices if this wasn't done and could prevent usage of GPU devices.
• Fixed OSL conversion of parameters causing crashes
• Graceful fallback to the default black background if a background shader or background light was disabled during an interactive render
• Distant/sun light angle parameter added
• Minor cleanups in multi-device code