Roadmap

This document describes the hight level roadmap of the Aqsis product line. We have gathered user and developer input via a survey, this roadmap defines the upcoming releases based on that feedback.

This is subject to change.

The following information details an overview of the area's of improvement for each planned release. This information is meant only to provide a high level picture of the release, please refer to the various design pages for more detail on the planned changes.

1.6 is an optimisation release; a lot of the development since 1.4 has been focussed on improving performance, mainly with projects under the Beaker umbrella.

• Avoid recomputing samples at overlapping bucket boundaries
• CqMatrix Optimisations
• Removal of IqBound
• Substantially refactored sampling and occlusion culling code
  • Tight bounding boxes for sampling
  • Revive old rasterizer code rather than using a sampling tree
  • New cache-friendly occlusion tree
  • Occlusion culling prior to micropolygon sampling
  • Improved sampling speed for RiPoints
• Enable the “focusfactor” approximation for depth of field by default
• Implement the “motionfactor” approximation for motion blur
• Improved shadow map rendering speed
• Faster splitting code for large point clouds

• Piqsl interface refactor
  • Single window interface
  • Improved keyboard shortcuts
  • Improved zooming
  • Z-buffer support
• Texturing improvements
  • Rewritten environment filtering as part of aqsis_tex
  • Finer control over texture filtering with “minwidth” and “trunc” parameters.
• Smooth shading interpolation for depth of field and motion blur
• “Matte alpha” support for directly rendering shadows on otherwise transparent surfaces
• New RIB parser
  • Better error reporting
• Multilayer support for OpenEXR display

• #2853236 - No AOV for volume shaders
• #2853241 - min() not working properly with varying
• #2731390 - RiBlobby const opcode not implemented
• #2846751 - Camera motion blur not working with points
• #2563908 - RiExposure has no effect on empty buckets
• #2425031 - ARMan fig 12.12 renders incorrectly
• #2270656 - (win32 only) aqsl 1.4.1 crashes on some SL syntax errors
• #1102356 - Rudi Cortes' Skin shader
• #2834057 - Aqsis failing to compile due to absent of boost-iostreams
• #2812953 - shadow(“blur”) filter artifacts with large values
• #2803564 - Scene crash
• #2730585 - RiProjection doesn't accept RI_NULL as projection
• #2541492 - std::exception / crash on Cylinder prim?
• #2012013 - DSO filename confusion/oversight
• #2138993 - slxargs sets array length to 1 for non-array parameters
• #2846526 - Bad render for image's first row and column
• #2853239 - Cannot retrieve string user attributes
• #1696939 - CoordSysTransform “NDC”
• #2847147 - Bad sampling for combined DoF and MB
• #2133952 - smooth shading interpolation artefacts
• #1929706 - SDS never split to patches when using facevertex
• #2738390 - Transformations prior to a RiProjection() call are ignored
• #2843067 - uniform primvars not working with RiPoints
• #2813534 - Escaped strings in RSL not working
• #2474255 - DoF artifacts at image edges
• #2023668 - .aqsisrc on Windows platform
• #2838827 - crop command causes artifacts
• #2319297 - Flipped surface normals with light transform
• #2862585 - Lighting artifact on polygons
• #2862549 - Reading an empty RIB produces a syntax error
• #2853253 - illuminate(from) not retrieved in volume with illuminance()
• #2827244 - large numbers of RiPoints incorrectly bound
• #2811298 - parameter passing using lightsource()
• #2811297 - odd behavior with match()
• #2811281 - arbitrary output variables not working
• #2811280 - Incorrect incident ray length in orthogonal projection
• #2802439 - AOV not working
• #2798384 - Piqsl z buffer
• #2730562 - OSX: Running the Aqsis app can “wipe” the users environment
• #2644580 - Function overloading in RSL
• #2531309 - artifacts with book export in piqsl
• #2474067 - DoF not implemented for RiPoints
• #2415815 - MPDump FTBFS with GCC 4.X
• #2169128 - Comments not parsed in the middle of an array or command.
• #2134164 - incorrect normals with orientation-changing transformations
• #2084218 - texture() sometimes returns black for entire grids
• #2023290 - cube environment map filtering is broken
• #2022177 - zoomed images in piqsl not updated during render
• #2013783 - Large cracks in subdivision surfaces
• #1829339 - Artefacts in SDS render (large micropolygons)
• #1431013 - subdivision mesh problem
• #1422544 - ShadingInterpolation glitches

• #2864575 missing ”-frames f1 f2” functionality
• #2863824 deforming SDS crash with differing primvars
• #2838825 pre-world command line options apply to all frames
• #2819398 RSL message passing function names act like keywords
• #2811294 environment(“blur”) between cube faces
• #2805396 black regions at glancing angles
• #2795195 SDS artifacts with creases
• #2499271 holes in motion blurred surface
• #2430306 instancing shaders is excessivly expensive
• #2319319 SDS edge artifacts with uniform layered shading
• #2173666 GeneralPolygons with holes are sometimes corrupted.
• #2085508 Space on point parameter default values
• #2038067 Memory allocation problem with trimmed NURBS
• #1876182 multiple definitions allowed for variables in SL
• #1848873 Shader parser says syntax error for a variable redeclaration
• #1846441 Crash with simple (malformed?) shader
• #1829378 type check for RSL printf args sometimes incorrect
• #1811161 arraylength() not implemented
• #1766621 Null shader won't compile.
• #1688157 Subdivision texture mapping error
• #1629731 Args to SL functions should not be writable
• #1627891 solar()/illuminate() issue within 'surface' shaders
• #946045 grid cracking: Black spots / sampling errors

• AqsisTex
• Piqsl
• Eqsl
• Smooth shading interpolation
• OSX bundle deliverable
• Linux desktop integration
• Internal shader preprocessor

• Autoshadows
• Miqser
• Performance improvements
• Bug fixing
• Layered Shaders
• OpenEXR support
• Blobbies support
• Facevertex support

Now that 1.2.0 is released, see here for more details of the final changes, or the ChangeLog.txt for even finer detail.

Proposed features can be found below, which should ultimately find their way into a planned/sheduled release. This should be considered a global todo list, or storage area for features that would be nice to include at some point.

1. inter-grid cracking problem
2. Refactor major code sections. A lot of the codebase has evolved into it's current state, now is a good time to refactor a lot of the internals, cleaning up interfaces and implementation details.
   1. Separate the RI interface code from the internal implementation details
3. Sampling performance. This includes lots of profiling and looking at the representation of micropolygons, buckets and grids.
4. Shading performance. This will probably involve a partial rewrite of the shader compiler and shader execution engine.
5. Raytracing. This is a necessary prerequisite for global illumination (which is a big job on its own), but is interesting enough in its own right that a working raytracer would be enough reason to release a new major version release.
6. RiGeometricApproximation(RI_FLATNESS). This is a small job, but it's very important.
7. Global illumination and raytraced ambient occlusion. These two kind of go together, because irradiance caches and occlusion caches are so similar. Once you've implemented one, you kind of have the other for almost free.
   1. This assertion may not be true on reflection. Current thinking is that BrickMaps(?) are superior to k-d trees for a combined irradiance cache/photon map, but this may not be true for occlusion caches. But then again, a brick map-like structure for occlusion caches might be better. We'll see when we get there, I guess.
8. Deep Shadow Maps
9. Soft shadows.
10. Better shader compiler, compiling to C++.
11. Supporting inline archives
12. Support for RI filters
13. Better support for Image Based Lighting.
14. librx support for providing feedback for DSOs.
15. “Layer Rendering.” Using some mechanism like AOVs, it would be nice to render different objects into different images in a way that could be composited later.
16. It would be handy if different AOVs could be sampled differently, say, using different PixelSamples settings. An example is rendering a “Beauty Pass” and a depth map in one render. The depth map should be sampled 1×1 without jittering.
17. Multi-threading.
18. It might be handy if motion vectors could be output as an AOV. Not sure if this is useful at all.
19. OpenGL/GPU based rendering, for super fast render times, like Parthenon.
20. OpenGL previewer?
21. Support for more output file formats