the reflections were still being calculated, they just weren’t being added to the final image, and it was specific to HDRI reflections on first hit specular materials (very specific, i know)
perfectly clear! :)… well, then that 2-3X speed boost is deffinitely a cool thing going on! Congrats!
I hope the code will be improved because 4 hours might be fast for the current development but for production use it is still an issue.
this was not meant in particular to your engine - just in general as you said that that type of code is rather new and is being intensively researched now.
well also hypershot which is blazing fast in preview is not that fast when you do than a final rendering.
maybe do not know that when they show the software they are simply in preview low res mode.
well, i’m not saying 4 hours to get to that point with every unbiased renderer- just with mine. keep in mind that this is java, so its naturally half as fast as any C++ renderers, I haven’t paid nearly as much attention to the sampling speed of my renderer:acceleration structures, memory management, optimization. Rather, I have paid attention mostly to the sampling patterns to try to get the most out of each sample. thus with my algorithm implemented in a faster/better renderer, you could probably get the same number of samples in much faster time (3-6 times the speed I’d guess for the same quality- provided this algorithm has been implemented).
Also keep in mind that it is unbiased rendering, you can render for as long as you want.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about trying has been to implement this technique, as hinted by veach, for animated sequences- so that while there will be noise in every frame, the noise will be coherent throught the animation and thus less visible. It also has the plus of having a similar convergance time as rendering a single image at once-
In MLT, one sample contributes to multiple pixels, so if you were to do it on multiple images, it would contribute to multiple pixels on multiple images- by only doing one image of an animation at once with unbiased raytracing, you are waiting time. Its kind of like trying to render each pixel individually if you do each frame individually.
I am not criticize you work - as I said I rather marvel about it.
I am used to see unbiased engine just being slower.
But I am curious about how fast you would get print ready results when you
optimize your code.
if i were to add a KD tree, add ray packets, triangle optimization, probably about 50000 for some of those scenes.
if i were to do all this and move it to C++, who knows
well I wish you good luck with your work and in case it might help blender one day it would be very amazing as well!
4000 spp, overnight render
fixed boolean operations and refraction.
Looking good… keep up the good work 
tuqueque
Added anistropic phong! - fixed a lot of things relating to the materials, and added more tonemapping options.
Looking very nice.
You should put the code in a nice tidy package when done and donate it to Farsthary, he’s continuing to work on his path tracer and could use all the reference he can get.
Great work oodmb!
Excellent results, oodmb. The speed is great concerning the final quality. Great coding.
oh yeah, i think i forgot to mention some stats on that image: 10 min, 200 spp (although it was probably ready after like 3 min, there was a firefly, and i wanted to kill it). using simple pathtracing with no MLT.
the only problem i see right now with giving it to him right now is that it currently contains unreleasable material related to a paper i am in the process of producing.
i can and probably will however give him a compilation of the classes relevant to what he needs.
Hey oodmb
The renders look beatuiful!
Farsthary has trouble downloading stuff on the internet connections in Cuba. We’re just downloading a dvd of code / apps / libs etc to deliver to him when we fly there next week.
If there’s anything you’ve got to give to him, could you post / pm a link and I’ll download it and put it on the dvd for him.
Thanks!
200 spp and 10 minutes and that quality??? That must be some groundbreaking stuff you are working on. Bravo!
I downloaded it and it does look promising. How do you create a TLR file?
by hand in notepad right now.
I’m currently doing some work on the scene file format, hopefully i’ll have something eventually close enough to sunflow’s to be mostly compatible. mostly i’m working on integrating janino and getting it to compile code in scene files.