Ray caster and path tracer improvements
The GUI should be cleaned up for ray caster and path tracer options. Items include
- it would be great to add in more materials to the default list of materials. I was able to find some stuff on discourse that I liked and I'm using the materials from those instead of the default ones in PV 5.8.
- it would be nice if the Ray Tracing section in the Properties panel could be moved to be next to the Ray Traced Rendering section (or maybe they can be combined somehow though that seems unlikely)
- the options need to be better linked in the GUI to what they can affect. for example, I think the OptiX pathtracer doesn't have the Denoise capability but if I have Samples Per Pixel set to 4 or greater then the Denoise option becomes available. Similarly I think Shadows is only relevant for OSPRay raycaster but it is always available. Another one is that materials seems to only be a valid option for the pathtracers and not OSPRay raycaster. I think this would go a long way towards making the ray tracing functionality in PV much more user friendly.
- if a material is set for a filter output then the color legend should by default be not visible. Steps to reproduce the annoying behavior in 5.8 is: a. Create a Wavelet source and change to Surface representation b. Enable Ray Tracing then set Back End to OSPRay pathtracer c. Make the Color Legend not visible d. Hide the Wavelet output and then show the Wavelet output again -- the color legend is now visible again. It looks like this is a general bug that's been fixed in master but it's probably worthwhile to check that reasonable there's reasonable behavior for ray tracing as well.
- what functionality works in parallel? I didn't try anything in parallel yet but didn't see anything in the upcoming changes to the documentation specifying what worked and didn't work in parallel. I know at one time this was only serial functionality and maybe that's not true anymore.
- It may be useful to have more than a single JSON material file. This causes issues with state files if there are multiple materials loaded.