Falcor 4.3

[skallweitNV]

• Toolchain
  • Upgrade projects to Win 10 version 2004 using SDK version 19041.
• Dependencies
  • Update packman to version 6.15.
  • Update slang to version 0.17.5.
  • Use same letter casing for package name and directory in Externals/.packman.
  • Get OSS dependencies from falcor_dependencies package placed in Externals/.packman/deps.
  • Add OpenVDB and NanoVDB.
• Core
  • Remove deprecated APIs.
  • Add support for shader model 6.4 and 6.5.
  • Add utility code for TraceRayInline.
  • Add encoding/decoding of 8-bit snorm values.
  • Add encoding/decoding of normals in 2x8 octahedral format.
  • Convert palettized images to RGBA when loaded by Bitmap.
  • Fix issue with the search paths when an empty directory exists in the list.
  • Add caps check for new D3D features.
  • Move Bitmap init logic from create function to constructor
  • Add separate constructor to Bitmap that allocates memory but doesn't copy initial data.
  • Set memory stats when creating Bitmap from file.
  • Show hint to enable breaking on exceptions when an exception is caught.
  • Add support for creating views for Texture3D/2DMS resources.
  • Cleanup handling of null views to fix D3D12 validation error (null views now use the correct view dimension).
  • Move creation of TLAS SRV from into ShaderResourceView.
  • Update ParameterBlock logic to not create views when binding resource to root descriptor.
  • Add warning when creating buffer larger than 4GB as this is currently not well supported.
  • Fix size computation in buffer creation to handle >4GB.
  • Add runtime size check for large SRV/UAV view creation.
  • Move script writing functions from Scripting to separate ScriptWriter class.
  • Refactor BBox and BoundingBox classes into AABB class that matches the GPU-side slang module.
  • Make Profiler a singleton.
  • Program::Desc internals no longer require entry points to be defined contiguously.
  • Decouple declaration and shader library addition for hit groups in RtStateObject. This allows any particular entry point to be referenced in multiple hit groups while only being defined once.
• DirectXTex
  • Fix row size calculation in CopyContext::ReadTextureTask to handle compressed formats.
  • Integrate DirectXTex for DDS import/export.
  • Remove legacy custom DDS loader.
  • Calculate and store row pitch and total size in Bitmap.
• Logging
  • Add a new Logger::Level::Debug log level.
  • Use shorter log labels without tabs.
  • Do not capture stdout when running Python scripts by default, making print() from Python scripts forward to the terminal window.
• CUDA
  • Fix the CudaInterop sample to build on VS 2019 and pull from Source/Externals/.packman/cuda
  • Update CUDA setup instructions in the README.
  • Add initial support for cross-compiling Slang compute shaders for CUDA execution.
• Shaders
  • Fix Slang preprocessor warning when the emissive sampler is not used.
  • Import SampleGeneratorInterface instead of SampleGenerator if possible.
• Scene
  • Cleanup to use enum directly in HitInfo struct.
  • Add instance type field to HitInfo struct to enumerate what class of geometry was hit.
  • Display materials in the UI in case-insensitive alphabetic order, rather than in material ID order.
  • Perform tangent space computation prior to pretransforming texture coordinates, as tangent space should be independent of texture transforms.
  • Renamed Scene::render to Scene::rasterize.
  • Add Scene::getSceneBoundsRadius() and Scene::getSceneBoundsCenter() and respective Python bindings
  • Bind scene acceleration structure as root descriptor (workaround for validation layer not correctly recognizing its view dimension).
  • Reduce scene GPU memory usage for the previous frame vertex positions.
  • Use 16-bit vertex indices for meshes with max 2^16 vertices.
  • Support mixed 16/32-bit format in the scene's global index buffer.
  • Support 32-bit draw IDs for rasterizing scenes with more than 2^16 mesh instances.
  • Remove deprecated BuffersAsShaderResource scene builder flag.
  • Add scene stats for texture compression and index/vertex/geometry memory usage.
  • Add detailed GPU memory usage stats for the scene representation.
  • Fix validation errors in BLAS construction.
  • Increase the maximum number of supported transforms and meshes to 2^21 each, reduce the number of supported materials to 2^21 as well.
  • Change RT build heuristics to place all static non-instanced meshes in a single BLAS.
  • Add scene builder flags to configure merging of meshes into BLASes.
  • Add Scene stats to show texture memory usage.
  • Make V-buffer format dynamically configured based on Scene requirements.
  • Add 96-bit V-buffer encoding to support large scenes that need 64-bit instance+primitive index.
  • Make Scene::setCamera() search by pointer (also fixes Python API).
  • Emit UpdateFlags::CameraSwitched when switching between cameras.
  • Add curves.
• SceneBuilder
  • Fix scene builder flag that controls material merging, use DontMergeMaterials.
  • Add optimization pass that removes unused meshes.
  • Improve error messages when adding instances.
  • Fix documentation error for addMeshInstance.
  • Allow configuring render settings.
  • Split meshes in scene builder when computing optimized mesh groups (BLASes) for ray tracing.
  • Cleanup tangent space computation and make sure prepareShadingData always generates a plausible TBN frame.
  • Add check that normal and tangent are non-parallel, to avoid degenerate tangent spaces for bad assets.
  • Add top-down median BVH builder for partitioning the mesh groups.
  • Pre-transform static non-instanced meshes to world space at load time.
  • Add mesh winding flag.
  • Move calculation of mesh groups and sorted mesh instance list to the scene builder.
  • Split large mesh groups into chunks to reduce BLAS build memory usage.
  • Perform BLAS build in multiple iterations to reduce memory usage.
  • Add async/multi-threaded texture loading.
  • Move texture coordinate quantization and material de-duplication to a post-processing step. This is to avoid accessing material textures during the majority of scene building, which we want to avoid for parallel texture loading to work.
  • Add parallel mesh creation.
  • Fix so that tangents are correctly set to zero if missing.
• Scene loading
  • Add more visible deprecation warning for fscene support.
  • Cleaning scripts from using .fscene files.
  • Use parent directory of .pyscene file as highest priority data directory during import.
  • Use parent directory of .py file as highest priority data directory during script loading.
  • Add new Python scene file format with many new features such as programmatically adding materials, cameras, lights, geometry and animations.
  • Loading Python scene files using the old # scenefile.xxx header for referencing a scene file results in an error.
  • Add TriangleMesh class to create and load simple triangle geometry (plus factory functions for quad, cube and sphere).
  • Add Transform class to setup transformations.
  • Add Python bindings for TriangleMesh, Transform, Animation as well as SceneBuilder.
• Animation
  • Fix pre/post infinity linear mode with hermite interpolation.
  • General code cleanup and documentation updates.
  • Add support for looping animation channels individually based on some of the options available in Maya (constant, linear, cycle, and oscillate).
  • Add UI and scripting to control whether or not animations should also loop globally as well as how each animation channel behaves outside of defined keyframes.
  • Remove the Animation::Channel struct. This construct is not really necessary and complicates things for no good reason.
• Material
  • Add a Transform to Falcor::Material, which can be used to apply scale/rotation/translation to all of the material's textures.
  • Texture transformation is implemented as a pretransformation of the texture coordinates of each mesh the material is bound to, using the inverse of its texture transform.
  • Minor fix to material comparison.
  • Add support for displacement mapping.
  • Extend Material to handle hair BCSDF parameters.
  • Add HairChiang16 using BxDF interface (eval, evalPdf and importance sampling implemented).
• Environment map
  • Allow loading/clearing env map from UI.
  • Change the order in which the rotations passed to EnvMap::setRotation() are applied from (Z * Y * X) to (X * Y * Z).
  • Add getDimensions method to EnvMap.
• Light probes
  • Remove LightProbe class and addadded EnvMapLighting which is used instead to do image-based lighting.
  • Remove light probes from the Scene and SceneBuilder classes (as well as the fscene importer).
  • Add EnvMapLighting to ForwardLighting pass to get back image-based lighting from the environment map.
  • Extend the SkyBox pass to directly support the environment map.
• Camera & lights
  • Introduce explicit RectLight, DiscLight and SphereLight classes.
  • Make Camera and Light take optional name parameter in the static create functions.
  • Expose Camera, Light and Material constructors to Python API.
  • Replace color/intensity properties on Light with just intensity in Python API.
  • Fix light direction UI widget to not modify the value unless it was changed in the UI.
  • Fix bug in DistantLight update flags on first frame.
• EmissiveLightSampler
  • Replace EmissiveLightSampler::prepareProgram with EmissiveLightSampler::getDefines.
  • Add onSurface flag to IEmissiveLightSampler to indicate if sample is used for surface or volume.
  • Implement onSurface flag in LightBVHSampler.
• PathTracer
  • Update nested dielectric code to interpret material nested priority 0 as the highest possible priority.
  • Fix deadlock condition in nested dielectrics due to repeated false intersections.
  • Rename useLightsInVolumes to useLightsInDielectricVolumes.
  • Add stats for number of path vertices in the path tracer.
  • Add method for adjusting shading normals to avoid back-facing view vectors.
• Mogwai
  • Add Mogwai::Renderer::clearScene() and Python binding, setting the scene to nullptr to explicitly free memory
  • Add -v,--verbosity command line argument to Mogwai to select log level.
  • Add UI button to dump scene statistics to logfile.
  • Add UI button to dump profiler data to logfile.
  • Add option to dump pixel stats to logfile.
  • Add option to dump pixel debug info to logfile.
• Python bindings
  • Remove deprecated APIs.
  • Add lights proprty to Scene.
  • Improve vector type bindings (added empty/scalar constructors, added direct access to components).
  • Add +-*/ operator bindings for float2/3/4, int2/3/4 and uint2/3/4 types (component-wise operations, no scalars).
  • Add bindings for AABB class.
  • Deprecate global script variables t, fc, vc and tc (use m.clock, m.frameCapture, m.videoCapture and m.timingCapture instead).
  • Add bindings to access scene statistics m.scene.stats.
  • Add bindings for profiler and make it accessible using m.profiler.
• Volume support
  • Add new Volume class representing heterogeneous volumes.
  • Add new Grid class representing NanoVDB voxel grids.
  • Add support for loading OpenVDB voxel grids (float only).
  • Add support for adding volumes via SceneBuilder (also exposed to Python).
  • Add simple visualization of volumes to SceneDebugger.
  • Add delta tracking transmittance estimator.
  • Add volumeLookups and avgVolumeLookups to PixelStats.
• Procedural primitive support
  • Add documentation on how to use custom intersections.
  • Add support for intersection shaders and defining custom primitives in the scene.
  • Allow user-defined AABBs for custom primitives.
  • Add helper to Scene.slang for getting a custom primitive's AABB
  • Add curve interscetion.
• Render passes
  • SceneDebugger
    • Add SceneDebugger pass for identifying asset issues.
  • GBufferRT
    • Add new deviceZ output to GBufferRT.
    • Add new linearZ output to GBufferRT. The output is a RG32Float with the first channel containing the linear z value and the second channel containing it's slope (max of ddx/ddy z).
  • InvalidPixelDetectionPass
    • Add warning to InvalidPixelDetectionPass pass if input format is non-float (can't represent inf/nan).
    • Fix broken NaN detection in InvalidPixelDetectionPass pass.
  • ImageLoader
    • Various fixes and improvements to ImageLoader pass.
    • Some cleanup of ImageLoader pass and add error check.
  • CompositePass
    • Add integer format support to CompositePass pass.
  • BSDFViewer
    • Small fix in BSDFViewer, enabling delta reflection lobe when specular is selected.
  • ForwardRenderer
    • Fix output in ForwardRenderer to use normalized normals.
  • ComparisonPass
    • Unblock labels by moving them to bottom of the window.
  • Tonemapper
    • Do not serialize exposureValue in ToneMapper anymore.
• Misc
  • Add scalar version of evalFresnelSchlick.
  • Add eval method to CameraRay.
  • Add getAverageRadiance method to LightCollection.
  • Add latlong_map_to_world to complement world_to_latlong_map.
  • Add AliasTable module for sampling a discrete distribution using the alias method.
  • Add hypothesis header-only library for doing statistical tests.
• Image tests
  • Increase test threshold for VBufferRT.
  • Add image test filtering base on tags.
  • Allow filtering on full test path.
  • Set default image test tolerance to 1e-12 and adjust the tests need higher tolerances.
  • Share image test helpers.py.
  • Add image tests for motion vectors.
  • Add a new set of image tests to run the scripts provided in Mogwai/Data
• Unit tests
  • Add unit tests for large buffer access.
  • Add unit tests for templated loads of 16-bit types from ByteAddressBuffer.
  • Add unit test for constant buffer in ParameterBlock.
  • Enable unit test for asuint16 cast.
  • Add unit test for casting float16_t to uint16_t.
  • Add unit test for default initialization of enum in struct.
  • Add unit test for read/write of 3D texture.
  • Update unit tests for large buffers.
  • Add unit tests for HairChiang16, including validation against pbrt reference data, white furnace tests, importance sampling test, and sampling consistency test.
• Documentation
  • Add more documentation on Python scene files.
  • Add some Python scene files to Media/TestScenes.
• Media
  • Remove alpha_test scene in falcor_media.
  • Move animated_cubes to TestScenes/AnimatedCubes in falcor_media.
  • Add TestScenes/Tutorial.pyscene to falcor_media.
  • Replace Arcade.fscene with Arcade.pyscene.