I´m not sure where to put this, so I´ll put in this more generic thread, but please point me to the correct place if there is one.

IMHO this should be included in Master, this is an awesome tool, for example to be able to clean up grass from grass patches that are distributed over a space, when you have to remove those parts that are inside the road but they should not, for example, this is great!

Any evolution regarding this? Specially now that the Code Quest started?

I would like to add two suggestions to Alembic:

Ok, thanks :)

How is this going?

Most of the time I’m from mobile, but I’ll look a way to join there :)

I’m trying to think in what I just said, to explain it in another way, once you have all the particles split it in bigger voxels, calculate each separately and interpolate the result this split could even be configurable so you could adapt it to a number of threads or parts, you could even avoid the interpolation part to have a preview, if you want the exact same result as we have now you just configure 1 thread and that’s it, if you want to require less memory during the process (and that is totally outside my small knowledge of Blender code and C++) you could configure 32 voxels for 16 threads, this way you only need in memory the working amount of particles, so less particles per voxels so theoretically in my wonderful perfect world that only exists in my mind you would need less memory per thread but more time for calculating the interpolation of the defined voxels when the are all complete... again... I’m not sure if this is a nonsense, but I’m trying to imagine how could it be solved as a logical problem :)

Since this is a voxelization process (I’m assuming that) couldn’t you split the work in bigger boxers, save in memory just the voxels if each zone limit, work each zone with one thread and once it’s completed merge or interpolate those voxels limits?

It´ñs working great, I´m prepairing a tutorial related to this.

I assume you solved the motion blur problem yesterday because now I got Motion Blur in Cycles with the latest fracture build!

And I just noticed your sample with the surface deform, yes, it could be similar to surface deform, but using particles instead of meshes and with the abiltiy to break those meshes based in distance from underlying particles or something similar.

On a side note, maybe this motion blur thing can be also applied to the actual Fracture Modifier results, since if we don´t bake the results to keyframed objects we don´t have motion blur, but this removes the ability to have a non broken object using the Perform Merge option, wich is super useful with glass.

Yes, think about a grid of particles, with the Molecular Addon you have the ability to make that group of particles to behave as a solid object, and using forces and collisions you can make that group to split or break, it is similar to the old days when Sotimage made use of Lagoa Unified simulation system.

But then... how does elbeem fluids do the motion blur with Cycles?

No motion blur in particle systems remeshed.

Exactly, this is very useful to be able to use fluids in production via Alembic.

So... how is this going?
Is some alternative to this already implemented in Master, since we can take multiple geometry samples I though something could be already implemented, just asking.

Yeah, decoupling tile sizes could be also a solution, in the end the target is to have a fast render and a fast denoiser avoiding the overhead of small tiles, so if the denoiser works better with bigger tiles the render could be divided in bigger tiles just for denoising, but since I don´t know the inners of the system I don´t know if it´s possible, but since you propose it, I assume it should be possible :)

Why not make the denoise as a post-render pass as other render engines?
This would kill the small-tiles problem because the denoise could be done with bigger tiles, I never understood why the current implementation does the denoising at the same time of the rendering.

In D2873#67419, @Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) wrote:

• If the tile is too big it can happen that the GPU finishes early and then has to wait on CPU threads to finish their tiles.

I promise I won't change the status of the task again if you say this is not valid and it has some correct workflow, but I was not sure if you were receiving the updates since it was tagged as invalid, so I re-enabled it.

And when you press the OpenGL render it does not refresh the texture during the render unless you were already in playback...

Ok, this means that I don't have to have the mouse over the texture panel when I press playback, but IF i'm not in the texture panel, the texture won't play back, no matter what do I activate in the Playback menu...

Don't worry :) I took it right I never take anything as angry or too serious unless it's pretty obvious it is writte with anger or seriousness hehe

In D1788#50258, @Sergey Sharybin (sergey) wrote:

Nooo! Do not share screenshots, share .blend file instead! That is the only way for developers to troubleshoot.

This applies to @Sean Kennedy (hype) and @David Andrade (davidandrade).

@David Andrade (davidandrade), when you mention GPU, is it CUDA or OpenCL? OpenCL is currently missing implementation, so i'm not sure what funky results will be happening there.

In D1788#50245, @Sean Kennedy (hype) wrote:

I did a couple tests to see if I had any problems in the alpha channel.

In this scene, it's just an environment light (HDRI). Seems to be working as expected.

In this next one, I added a point light and a mesh light (plane). Still seems to be working ok.

And as I was doing a demo scene for a blog post, I noticed that a mesh light on my test object was wrecking the shadow catcher. It's a bit strange that a geometry light was wrecking the scene in my blog test scene, but the mesh light in the other test scene did not. Perhaps it has to do with the positioning and shape of the mesh light. In mt blog test scene, it's a cylinder, and is inset into other geometry a bit. Perhaps that's causing the ground plane to be picking up a big cast shadow from the geometry that is blocking the cylinder light?

In D1788#50168, @Sean Kennedy (hype) wrote:

I like it so far! Simple to set up, very nice to see in the viewport, and a bit faster and easier to use in compositing. Great work! Looking forward to seeing how it continues to develop.

Is the idea to someday have it as an actual shader? That might give a bit more control, especially in the viewport.

Anyway, nice work so far! Keep it up!

Ok, then if someone can guide me to build alembic and link it I can prepare a VM and make a build, I'm not sure how to do those two things, for the time being I know how to build blender and how to apply a patch, but I don't know what do I have to build regarding alembic and how the linking works.

Bit to give feedback we will need to have a build :D

In D1788#42840, @Sergey Sharybin (sergey) wrote:

@Juan Gea (juang3d), than\ks for the feedback, but it's a bit too early to expect something working yet.. There are known bugs and limitations to be solved still. So be patient a bit until the catcher will fully rock :)

Hi there again.

Ok, I did some fast tests, I'll prepare some pictures tomorrow but so far the problem I see is that if I use a geometry light (wich is what we use nowadays) the shadow catcher does not catch any shadows, so I.E. if you put a box over a plane, activate the plane's shadow catcher option and put an sphere as light source, even deactivating the environment completely, there is no shadow at all, but if you see the plano without the shadow catcher option, you can see the shadow created by the sphere.

I'm prepairing a 2.77 build to test this, but so far from the description I just miss the ability to reflect things, so the shadow catcher should have the hability to create reflections apart from catching shadows, so for example if we have to place an object in a shiny surface we get the shadows + the reflections.

@Julian S (julian)
Sorry Julian, you are right.
Where can we see the design task? I'm new to all this :)
Cheers.

Weird but in the build of 2.77 RC2 I have I can't see the network drives, but I just have made a custom build with the latest code of the git repo and I can see the network drives like X: so it seems to be fixed now, at least for me.

Same situation here, the thing is that I have the drive mapped to X, it's a local hard drive folder that I map to a network drive to have a uniform work drive.

Is there a way to compile this as an addon that does not require a complete Blender compile?

In D1783#42143, @Thomas Volkmann (knekke) wrote:

Using it in production right now... just because I can. Wouldn't have happened without that patch.
Too bad I can't render on the farm because there is no windows build.....

In D1783#41977, @Thomas Volkmann (knekke) wrote:

I just managed to build it on Fedora 22 and took a quick look.
Works exactly how I would want it to work! Thanks for sharing this awesome patch DwarfLabs!!!
I really hope this get's implemented soon, as I am sure it will bring a lot of attention to Blender from people/Studios who were scared away, because they couldn't easily get their existing assets in (or stuff made in Blender out)....

May I ask someone to post a build with this somewhere? (for Windows 64 I mean) I can't build Blender in my system right now but I would like to test this and see how it compares with our current Alembic workflow with other packages.