Cycles Updates (Patreon)

Apologies for the long wait since my last post. I've made a bunch of changes and improvements to my implementation of the Cycles renderer, which is always time consuming since there's no proper developer documentation available for it, but I think it was worth it. 😅 

I've more or less revamped my entire implementation for the Cycles renderer and added a buch of new features (as shown in the video):

• Support for custom Cycles shaders with Lua

It is now possible to create custom Cycles shaders using Lua. This is similar to Blender's node editor (except as code) and the system also comes with some new default node types (such as logical and/or/xor/etc. nodes). Since they're just Lua-scripts, this also makes it very easy to share custom shaders for other people to use.

If anyone knows any neat stylized Cycles node setups, please let me know and I'll integrate them into Pragma as default options!

• Faster/improved Cycles render previews

As you can see in the video, rendering with Cycles is a hell of a lot faster now. Preview renders only take a few seconds at most, and you don't have to wait until the image has been fully rendered anymore to see the result. I've also added a new caching system and implemented several performance improvements to Pragma which save up a lot of rendering resources for Cycles to use. I've also added a progressive refine option, which works the same as in Blender (i.e. you can just continuously let it render your image and improve it, and then just manually stop whenever you want).

•   Subdivision

A few people were getting lighting glitches on some models, so I've implemented a mesh subdivision algorithm (same one as used by Blender), which should help to prevent that from occurring:

I haven't published the update yet, since I'm still finishing things up, but the changes should be available for the preview version some time next week. 😄

I'm also planning on purchasing a license for the trueSKY SDK ( https://simul.co/ ) for dynamic sky and weather generation, but I'm still waiting for a bugfix in the next SDK version before I can give that a proper try.