The idea is that EEVEE and Cycles viewport rendering is now what you start with, and so the first settings you need to tweak are everything that affects the look and quality of the render. Only later do you need to press F12 or save the render to a file, so having Dimensions as the first open panel does not make as much sense anymore.
The number of panels in the render properties also got quite long and tedious to navigate, with not much space left for new features. Color Management and Simplify are important settings for look and quality, and adding them to the already crowded render settings would have made them even longer without this reorganization.
If this is better or not of course depends on your workflow, particularly how much viewport rendering you do compared to pressing F12.
Well, modern ideas and modern human logic are showing signs of being totally disconnected from reality.
But nevermind, what would be really nice is having some visual info on the header or top bar or somewhere in plain sight… about which render engine is used. Since it’s gone…
Just noticed, Lukas Stockner has had a patch submitted which was more or less unnoticed by well…everyone. https://developer.blender.org/D3900
It’s a new shading mode that is very similar to the multiscatterGGX, but simpler to compute and with no additional noise. Sometimes the dev. site feed goes so fast you miss these things.
Oh, ok. That’s buildbot? I’ve been using it but I never knew it was named as such. So I guess if I download those they (2.79 and 2.80beta) will come with RTX support?
The reason is because the implementation is more or less unfixable on the Mac. since Apple has deprecated the API. Please note not to place any blame on AMD since they have no control over the platform’s drivers.
At least Apple users have OpenSubDiv now, but this shows they are still on the platform with the highest risk of degradation in experience.
I recently asked the question if MIS on lamps is buggy when using the branched path intergrator with sample all lights enabled. I would like to demonstrate the problems on this simple scene.
The scene is modelled in real world scale, consists of two area lamps, is enclosed, all caustics are disabled, the sampling method is Sobol.
While enabling MIS also removes glossy noise around the objects corner, it also amplifies/ introduces noise in the transparent part of the object. It is no longer clear, which result is preferable from a noise ratio perspective.
A more extreme example of this can be seen when rendering the Agent Interior CPU file in BPT mode. There is a lot of noise introduced just from using MIS.
Edit: Lukas already replied before the renders on the Agent scene were finished
There is a known problem with MIS in BPT mode, yes - it doesn’t cause wrong results, but noise is higher than it could be. However, I can’t tell whether it causes this particular problem without testing.
I originally wanted to handle it together with the lamp BVH GSoC project, but I should probably just work on a standalone fix.
Do you plan to implement the Lamp Sun in order to have the lighting according to its inclination [such as in Vray] so you can recreate sunrise / sunset?
Making an animation in blender for the Solar study is not the best of simplicity…