Maniphest T80823

Cycles Baking is not available when using Optix
Closed, Resolved
Actions

Assigned To
Aaron Carlisle (Blendify)
Authored By
Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren)
Sep 16 2020, 12:08 AM
Tags
  • BF Blender
  • Documentation
  • Cycles
Subscribers
Aaron Carlisle (Blendify)
Jesse Yurkovich (deadpin)
Mindinsomnia (mindinsomnia)
Richard Antalik (ISS)
Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren)

Description

System Information
Operating system: Windows-10-10.0.18362-SP0 64 Bits
Graphics card: GeForce RTX 2080/PCIe/SSE2 NVIDIA Corporation 4.5.0 NVIDIA 452.06

Blender Version
Broken: version: 2.91.0 Alpha, branch: master, commit date: 2020-09-15 09:04, hash: rB60fee7832342
Worked: Never, the manual was probably never updated for Optix rendering.

Short description of error
The manual describes Render Baking as if it's always available when using Cycles. The entire panel is hidden when using Optix, though.

Exact steps for others to reproduce the error

  1. Open the Rendering » Cycles » Render Baking section of the manual.
  2. See that there is no mention of Optix being incompatible.
  3. Open Blender.
  4. In Preferences, enable Optix rendering.
  5. Check the Render properties tab, and see that there is no Bake panel.
  6. In Preferences, enable CUDA/OpenCL/CPU rendering.
  7. Check the Render properties tab, and see that the Bake panel appears.

There is no indication that the Bake panel is disabled when using Optix, and the manual doesn't mention this either. I had to dig into Cycles' UI source code to figure out why the panel wasn't showing.

Related Objects

Mentioned Here
rBM7169: Cycles: GPU rendering list unsupported features under each device
rBM7175: Document OptiX limitations on individual pages also
T76898: Render baking panel disappears when GPU rendering and OptiX are enabled.

Event Timeline

Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren) created this task.Sep 16 2020, 12:08 AM
Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren) added projects: Documentation, Cycles.
Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren) updated the task description.
Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren) updated the task description.
Jesse Yurkovich (deadpin) added a subscriber: Jesse Yurkovich (deadpin).EditedSep 16 2020, 9:29 AM

It's mentioned way over here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html#supported-features-and-limitations

Organization can probably use some work.

UI rant:
This is a pretty general problem though, and it happens with other features in blender too - the complete hiding of panels/or UI elementst when an option in some other completely separate place is tweaked. A better design goal would be to 1. Simply disable the panel/UI element 2. Drop a warning note in the UI layout that says why it's been disabled.

Mindinsomnia (mindinsomnia) added a subscriber: Mindinsomnia (mindinsomnia).Sep 16 2020, 11:30 AM

Maybe information about the limitations of each compute device should appear as an information box somewhere below the choice of compute device in the preferences? That way users could see immediately as they change between compute devices what the pros/cons are for each one.

Richard Antalik (ISS) changed the task status from Needs Triage to Confirmed.Sep 28 2020, 9:51 AM
Richard Antalik (ISS) added a subscriber: Richard Antalik (ISS).

I think this limitation should be linked from baking page. On the other hand when I googled this, I got T76898 as first result, so it's not that hidden.

Sybren A. Stüvel (sybren) added a comment.Sep 28 2020, 11:14 AM

My goal with the bug report was indeed to get things better documented. If there are limits to baking, these should be mentioned on the manual page that deals with baking. The fact that some external search engine can find information on the subject doesn't mean our documentation is good.

Aaron Carlisle (Blendify) closed this task as Resolved.Oct 1 2020, 6:27 PM
Aaron Carlisle (Blendify) claimed this task.
Aaron Carlisle (Blendify) added a subscriber: Aaron Carlisle (Blendify).

Fixed in rBM7175 and rBM7169