Here’s an updates on what we’re working on in Cycles. Up to now, the features that we’ve added for the 2.64 release are BVH build time optimizations, exclude layers, motion/UV passes, filter glossy option, a light falloff node, a fisheye lens (by Dalai Felinto), ray length access (by Agustin Benavidez), and some other small things.
There’s also now a page in the Cycles manual about Reducing Noise in renders. All of these tricks are used in production with other render engines and should apply to path tracers in general.
Currently there’s still three major features on my list to implement: motion blur, volumetric rendering and a contribution pass. We already have a vector pass now for doing motion blur in compositing, but real raytraced motion blur would be nice as well. The code for this is mostly written but work is needed to make this faster, currently it’s slowing down our raytracing kernel even if the there are no motion blurred objects.
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