Shadow catchers: we’ll try a different algorithm that can take into account indirect light.

Volume rendering: we plan to implement ray-marching and light sampling with more modern algorithms.

When functionality is missing, it’s usually because we want to take a different approach in the new architecture. In the coming months we will try more optimization ideas, and restore missing functionality. OptiX support was added just a few days ago by Patrick Mours. Scenes have been modified to remove features like volume rendering, which are not implemented yet.īe aware that the numbers will change as we keep working on the new architecture. Initial Resultsįirst, some results from GPU rendering with well-known benchmark scenes. We expect it will take at least 6 months until this work is part of an official Blender release. A technical presentation for developers on the new architecture is available, and the code can be found in the cycles-x branch on. Today we’re sharing some initial performance results, and publishing the code to collaborate with Cycles contributors. There’s just enough functionality to render some of our benchmark scenes now. To that end, we’ve implemented a prototype of a new GPU kernel, and new scheduling algorithms for viewport and batch renders. Our first target was to validate the new architecture.

Introduce more advanced rendering algorithms.

Improve performance on modern CPUs and GPUs.

Improve usability of viewport and batch rendering.

Improve the architecture for future development.

The Projectīroadly speaking, the goal of the project is to: Rather than finding quick fixes or optimizations that solve only part of the problem, we’re rethinking the architecture as a whole.

To address that, Sergey and I started a research project named Cycles X, with the aim is to refresh the architecture and prepare it for the next 10 years. However some decisions made in the past are holding back performance and making it difficult to maintain the code.

We’re keen to make bigger improvements to core Cycles rendering. We learned a lot in those 10 years, things that worked well, but also things that didn’t work well, or became outdated as rendering algorithms and hardware evolved. In the past decade Cycles has developed into a full-fledged production renderer, used by many artists and studios. Today it’s been exactly 10 years since Cycles was announced.

Crazy bump in blender