TLDR: Render Moana 20 times faster!

• Thanks to Embree (and other optimizations) rendering is 20 times faster now. Instead of taking 26 hours like in 2021 gonzales finished after 78 minutes.
• All scenes from Bitterli’s resources can be rendered now.
• A power-based light sampler. This is especially important for the spaceship as there are lots of tiny lights in the screen in the cockpit.
• A Debian package for ptex](https://mentors.debian.net/package/ptex/).
• Reworked dependencies on Embree, OpenImageIO and Ptex relying on existing Debian packages.
• Lots of new materials like CoatedDiffuse, Conductor, Dielectric and Hair to be able to render scenes for PBRTv4.
• Adding volume integration (e.g. the Volumetric Caustic from Bitterli).
• OpenImageIO for most of texturing, caching and image writing.

TODO:

• Ray differentials.
• Parallel parsing (shouldn’t be too difficult using Swift’s structured concurrency for PBRT’s Import statement).
• Getting all PBRTv4 scenes to work (most of them should work, the rest should be relatively easy).
• Bump and displacement mapping.
• Memory usage goes up when using Embree. I have yet to investigate this. Also mapping materials etc. for Embree is done very quick’n’dirty.
• A denoiser.
• GPU rendering; this will be probably next on my plate.

May, 15th, 2023
Andreas