Adaptive Samples is Coming!

Check it out! https://developer.blender.org/D808

A patch for adaptive stopping and sample distribution has been made off the massive metropolis sampling patch, so I’m guessing that sometime in the next few releases we’ll see it merged to master :)

What is all this you ask? To quote from the patch:

Adaptive stopping: For every tile, the remaining error is estimated after a certain number of samples … Once the error is below the threshold, the tile is stopped. In case the maximum amount of samples per tile is reached, the tile stops as well, even if the threshold is not reached yet. This does not affect the individual pixels in the tile, that’s what adaptive distribution is for.

Adaptive distribution: If this option is enabled, the samples inside every tile are also distributed accordingly to noise levels. Once the warmup interval is over, an importance map is generated and samples are drawn from it (this happens on the CPU even for GPU rendering). This helps mainly for big tiles (usually >32×32) with different levels of noise, for example, at the edge between scene and background.

In retrospect, the name for this blog was a pretty terrible idea.

7 thoughts on “Adaptive Samples is Coming!”

  1. October 2, 2014 at 11:46 pm
    Wolfgang Fähnle

    Hi Greg, how did you composite the adaptive sampling map out of the render?

    Thanks, mib2berlin

  2. November 1, 2014 at 1:42 pm
    Rico Cilliers

    cool stuff!

    I was checking out some of the adaptive sampling tests and stuff on BA… some of the guys there are getting their render times cut in half or better! that’s insane. I really hope we get to use this in master soon.

  3. January 21, 2015 at 3:34 pm
    Den

    How to set the parameters for Importance Sampling, and where to find the settings?
    I have a build from this thread http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?282540-Cycles-tonemapping/page18 and Lukas Stockner said that he included AS in those builds

    • January 22, 2015 at 6:11 pm
      W.Faehnle

      Hi Den, in the latest version of Adaptive Sampling Lukas has moved AS to the Experimental Feature Set in Render settings.

      Cheers, mib2berlin

      • January 23, 2015 at 8:46 am
        Den

        Actually – already in supported =)
        But I didn`t understood how to set up my scene for AS, How to set up AS itself..

  4. September 7, 2015 at 1:19 am
    Sebbo

    Wow a whole Blog about the new feature D808 …
    Adaptiv sampling ..
    Ö.ö can’t wait to see it in blender 2.7..V..
    —– wonderful new feature are in experimental Phase again .

    Best regard