Hi all, this was reported in the easter egg thread some time ago but I think it deserves a own thread.
lukasstockner97 published a patch for Cycles including MLT (Metropolis Light Transport).
There was good process lately an I do some test render with patched Cycles.
You can´ t compare samples between path and MLT, these pictures are rendered 5 minutes each.
Was 800 samples for pathtracing, stop MLT after 5 minutes.
@marcoG_ita, diffuse material in both render. @bluecd, in the patch thread is a water caustic render. @Kramon, I ask developer to put builds here, if he have time.
Speed improvements should come with time. Hopefully this can be made a lot faster without removing optimizations for other modes (tiling, etc).
Also, remember this patch is sort of two patches in one. There’s also support for noise-adaptive AA samples for progressive and (eventually?) branched path. That’s also a work in progress. The guidance works pretty well in my tests, but there isn’t yet support for rendering tiles to different sampling levels. So it’s not always worth that much.
Finally, I have an OS X build of this. Since no one else seems to be making those, I’ll throw it online tonight when I get home.
This is a surprise, so that means we now have two new developers working on major sampling optimizations?
I bet the studio teams who will be tasked with Project Gooseberry production are crying tears of joy about now, because they would actually be able to render out trickier lighting situations if needed in a much faster time-frame, which very well might mean the movie having much better visuals and really showing that Cycles can compete with the big guns