Our render archetecture doesn't lend itself to gpu-type processing. You might be able to hack in something for e.g. soft shadows or whatever, but I think that would be a mistake; such an effort should be coordinated with the other refactors we need to do there, and I don't know if anyone even knows when those refactors will happen, or what their final form will be.
Joe On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Charles Wardlaw <cward...@marchentertainment.com> wrote: >> >> Animation is a big part of blender, and faster subsurf/armature >> systems would be very, very helpful. To be honest it'd be far more >> helpful then faster physics or rendering systems, and you'd have a >> much better shot at success. >> > > I would love to see GPGPU-enabled armature calculations... Although, since > many of the best rigs require custom python scripts I wonder if Python > wouldn't be a bottleneck there. > > On the renderer: you wouldn't have to rewrite everything. Not every part of > the rendering process benefits from multiprocessing anyways, just like not > every part benefits from the various data structures. But there've been a > number of nice papers on using GPGPU processing to accelerate the parts of > rendering that tend to be the most heavy -- ray collisions, subdivision (as > you said above), ambient occlusion, or even the generation of point clouds > for other purposes (AO, GI, FG). If Blender could generate point clouds > quickly and that data could be accessed and exported, a lot of studios would > be very interested. > > There's also the idea of accelerating nodes in the compositing or texture > graphs. And now that sculpt is multithreaded, I wonder how hard it would be > to get some of the processing offloaded to OpenCL cores. > > Then again, hardware-accelerated subdivision is a serious boon. At work > we're using Mach Studio, which is a GPU-based real-time rendering system. > It subdivides on the fly, on the card, and even with a few million polys in > a scene you have completely interactive turnarounds. Less so with > full-scene AO, but it's still usable. The last version released something > akin to the DX11 Tessellator functionality on DX10 cards, and watching it > generate a million polygons from a bump map and a plane is something to > behold. > > ~ C > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > Bf-committers@blender.org > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers > _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers