“Improving Real-Time Rendering of Dynamic Digital Characters in Cycles”, 2021-12-10 (; backlinks):
Facebook (now Meta) joined the Blender development fund during 2020 with the main purpose of supporting the development of Cycles. A team from Facebook Reality Labs led by Feng Xie and Christophe Hery are interested in using Cycles as a renderer for some of their projects. They chose Cycles because it is a full-featured production renderer; however, they are also interested in improving Cycles’s real time rendering capabilities and features for high quality digital human rendering.
There are 3 main areas of collaboration:
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 & eye rendering. In particular, we want to support the anisotropic BSSRDF model important for skin rendering, and accelerate the convergence of caustic effects important for eye rendering (planned).
A short paper about the cloud based real time path tracing renderer Feng’s team built on top of Blender-Cycles will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2021.