Farewell to William, and thanks for the contributions.
It took more time to choose than the time he worked, and I think he worked remotely.
It doesnât have to be an easy job and it wonât be easy to find someone.
Very interesting wording. Seems like he was let go rather than he left Blender Foundation.
Anyone knows why he is no longer part of BF?
He clearly isnât working for them anymore. Everything else is pointless speculation helping no one!
12 Likes
Cycles
- Add OptiX temporal denoising support (commit ) (Patrick Mours)
Anyone know if this works like the normal optix denoisr, or one still have to play with python code for it to work ?
A few days ago, Python was still needed, as well as several manual settings:
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Ah too bad, letâs hope in the future it becomes as easy as picking âoptix temporalâ from the drop down menu, ticking vector+denoising passes and hit render.
1 Like
CPU rendering finally gets a speedup, the compact BVH building Embree does is now optional.
rBe2a36a6e459f (blender.org)
The difference is not huge, but it gets more noticeable the more complex the scene. Interiors and characters with hair seem to benefit the most.
7 Likes
Optional BVH compression is very welcomed but itâs only a part of CPU performance improvement.
Also there is a tradeoff with memory usage so in some scenarios it might not work due to RAM limitation.
The major part of CPU rendering speedup is not yet implemented:
2 Likes
you can easily add up Ram to your cpu so itâs a fair price to performance, for gpu in the other hand itâs the inverse, vram is more important to speed as it is already fast
Not possible if you already maxed out RAM on your motherboard.
If you are doing that and your scenes are consuming over 128GB of RAM to render, then itâs time to stop using general consumer grade CPUâs and motherboards.
A major fix (for an issue that impacted Cycles since the beginning) has just been committed.
rB74afc86d4bf1 (blender.org)
Essentially, it should now be far easier and more practical to render detailed objects at real-world scale without running into issues (such as black artifacts). There is a small performance hit, but real-world scales without issues also means being able to do things like have lights at more realistic values (which may help with adaptive sampling and denoising).
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You can buy 64 core CPU and 256GB RAM kit for âconsumerâ grade platform right now.
Threadripper and friends is what is known as enthusiast grade, he is talking about consumer grade which are machines that come with standard Ryzen and Intel i-series chips.
Anyway, I could actually see 128 gigs maxing out if you are doing 4K resolutions and above (which requires a massive bump in model, shading, and texturing detail to properly take advantage of).
Aaah, sorry. My bad. To me consumer grade means everything from Athlon to Threadripper. Guess I wasnât paying attention. Workstation is Threaddripper PRO ofc.
Anyway my point wasnât exactly about how much RAM you can have but about switching between compressed and uncompressed BVH.
If you have a project that is edging on your current (not theoretical) RAM capacity optional BVH compression is not for you.
Used Xeons can be had for super cheap. I just have away a dual E-2660v2 (=20C/40T) for free after not being able to sell it for âŹ500. That old thing goes to 384GB RAM, and used ECC DDR3 is cheap too. Sure, not the fastest machine by todays standards, but older workstations can get you in the 256GB+ RAM territory for little money.
3 Likes
This updated list of current Blender devs has only been posted recently. Seems like Lukas Stockner has been given a 6 month grant to work on Cycles, which is great news. Not sure if this was publicly announced or not? It is also damn impressive to see that full developer list 
27 Likes
And Lukas Stockner can get to work right away (since he already knows much of the code).
I wonder if this means the completion of some of the patches he started and never got to finishing (such as the new GGX multiscatter approach that does not produce near as much noise)?
1 Like
sad to see Omar Emara with a grant for 3 months only, heâs working on realtime viewport compositor and triaging so im quiet excited about that feature. and of course nice to see lukas joining the team !
3 Likes