LogInThe team developed a cloud-based real-time path tracing renderer on top of Blender Cycles.
The Blender team shared a blog post and how their team and Meta are collaborating to improve the possibilities of Blender Cycles.
Facebook (now called Meta) originally joined the Blender development fund in 2020. The company wanted to support the development of Cycles. A team from Facebook Reality Labs led by Feng Xie and Christophe Hery are now studying the use of Cycles as a renderer for some of their projects. One of their main focuses is using the renderer for high quality digital human rendering.
There are three main areas of collaboration between the Blender team and Facebook Reality Labs:
- Scene update optimization: reduce synchronization cost between the scene data and their on-device copies to enable real-time persistent animation rendering.
- Add native procedural API and Alembic procedural to accelerate baked geometry animation loading and real-time playback.
- Better BSDFs models for skin and eye rendering. The teams want to support the anisotropic BSSRDF model important for skin rendering, and accelerate the convergence of caustic effects important for eye rendering (planned).
Among other things, the development update focuses on streaming data into Cycles directly from the Alembic file at render time which is said to improve load times by "up to an order of magnitude". The post states that rendering Trudy (a 340,000-poly digital character) in Blender 3.0 using Cycles’ native alembic Procedural increases the framerate by 12x, from 2 to 24 frames per second.
You can find the full post here. You can also learn about a paper about the cloud-based real-time path tracing renderer Meta’s team built on top of Blender Cycles here. The paper will be presented at Siggraph Asia 2021.
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