Cycles: pointcloud rendering

This add support for rendering of the point cloud object in Blender, as a native
geometry type in Cycles that is more memory and time efficient than instancing
sphere meshes. This can be useful for rendering sand, water splashes, particles,
motion graphics, etc.

Points are currently always rendered as spheres, with backface culling. More
shapes are likely to be added later, but this is the most important one and can
be customized with shaders.

For CPU rendering the Embree primitive is used, for GPU there is our own
intersection code. Motion blur is suppored. Volumes inside points are not
currently supported.

Implemented with help from:
* Kévin Dietrich: Alembic procedural integration
* Patrick Mourse: OptiX integration
* Josh Whelchel: update for cycles-x changes

Ref T92573

Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D9887

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/intern/cycles/blender/object.cpp b/intern/cycles/blender/object.cpp
index d6c52f7faf9..86314d3b196 100644
--- a/intern/cycles/blender/object.cpp
+++ b/intern/cycles/blender/object.cpp
@@ -72,7 +72,8 @@ bool BlenderSync::object_is_geometry(BObjectInfo &b_ob_info)
 
   BL::Object::type_enum type = b_ob_info.iter_object.type();
 
-  if (type == BL::Object::type_VOLUME || type == BL::Object::type_HAIR) {
+  if (type == BL::Object::type_VOLUME || type == BL::Object::type_HAIR ||
+      type == BL::Object::type_POINTCLOUD) {
     /* Will be exported attached to mesh. */
     return true;
   }
@@ -206,7 +207,7 @@ Object *BlenderSync::sync_object(BL::Depsgraph &b_depsgraph,
     return NULL;
   }
 
-  /* only interested in object that we can create meshes from */
+  /* only interested in object that we can create geometry from */
   if (!object_is_geometry(b_ob_info)) {
     return NULL;
   }