There are some stunning particle improvements in this one.
NEW: PARTICLE DEPTH OF FIELD
New material functions allow small, out-of-focus particles to be expanded for depth of field the same way that opaque particles would be rendered.
The left image shows a simple scene with a lot of particles placed on the ground. The right image has circle depth-of-field enabled and the new material function renders the particles out of focus like all other geometry. The quality is even better as they don’t suffer from noise artifacts. We always expand out-of-focus particles by more than a pixel to avoid shimmering.
NEW: PARTICLE CUTOUTS (FAST FLIPBOOK PARTICLE RENDERING)
Particle cutouts allow for flipbook particles to render as much as three times faster!
Particles using flipbook animations (Sub-UV Animation module) tend to have quite a bit of wasted overdraw - areas where the pixel shader had to be executed, but the final opacity was zero. As an example, the texture below is mostly comprised of transparent pixels.
We can now render particles with much tighter bounding geometry, cutting out the invisible areas, instead of using a full quad regardless of what frame of the animation is playing.
