Env. Light Visibility Cache

[Dade]

I have reworked a bit Env. Light Visibility Cache. This is a normal direct light only rendering:

and this is with cache enabled:

Best setup

In order to have the best results, you should use one of the following combo: sun+sky, sun+LDR (sun + infinite light with low dynamic range image). Any other combo like sphere light source + sky (like in the above test) will work fine too.
The classic infinite light with HDR image will work, and will work better than without cache, but it is far more efficient and faster to render with true sun.
The reason is that the optimal cache resolution for rendering HDR would be higher than HDR image resolution itself. This would be clearly insane in term of memory usage and pre-processing time.

Initial noise

At the very beginning of the rendering the noise will not uniform, like in this 10 samples/pixel rendering:

however Env. Light Visibility Cache is an unbiased method so the rendering will converge to the right result, this is the same rendering after 150 samples/pixel:

For the same reason all the of materials should work fine (i.e. no glossy problems like with DLSC).

TODO

OpenCL support, volumes support and transparent materials. I have still to check/add the support for the above topics so don't be surprised if they will not work.

Conclusion

I'm not currently aware of any problem (aside the one in the TODO list) so install the latest binaries and if you find one, please, post a test scene.

[zuljin3d]

wow, thanks Dade!
I correctly understand, from the above, that while "the cache" works only on cpu, and the best result will be with (lamps, sun+ sky).
And with one single hdri, relut will be worse?

[Sharlybg]

thanks
Downloaded and tried.

I'm not currently aware of any problem (aside the one in the TODO list) so install the latest binaries and if you find one, please, post a test scene.

It crash viewport rendering when Cache is enable.

[Sharlybg]

it work nicely on glossy surface :

[epilectrolytics]

Works well here with PGI and glossy.

[Dade]

It crash viewport rendering when Cache is enable.

I should have fixed this problem.

[Dade]

Any interest in having persistent cache ? It will work like PhotonGI: it can be used for animations of static environments (i.e. fly trough).

[lacilaci]

Any interest in having persistent cache ? It will work like PhotonGI: it can be used for animations of static environments (i.e. fly trough).

Is there risk of flickering when not using persistent cache?

[epilectrolytics]

Any interest in having persistent cache ? It will work like PhotonGI: it can be used for animations of static environments (i.e. fly trough).

Yes please

I guess with HDRI we would need to increase the parameters resulting in longer cache building time.

Maybe single map and DLSC too?

Probably there should be a new tab in Blender properties where all caches are listed together and could be saved,
I will ask in BlendLuxCore Development thread.

[Dade]

Any interest in having persistent cache ? It will work like PhotonGI: it can be used for animations of static environments (i.e. fly trough).

Is there risk of flickering when not using persistent cache?

No, as far as I know, but it can be used to save pre-processing time when rendering animations, it can literally save hours of rendering when using short rendering times for each frame (1-2 minutes).