Denoiser

[nicola_barbano]

Hi! I've just update in this new release 1.7, looks amazing!
But I found, from my animation test, that the Denoiser (Nvidia AI) works worse (I have trees with staines from Denoiser) than the previous release of Vantage. Now we can not select the "quantity" of Denoiser and we can only choose from the Preferences between "Vantage Denoiser" and "Nvidia AI", so just ON/OFF correct?
Even if it works quite good I hope you can improve it in the next release, maybe re-adding also the slide selection for "denoiser" quantity.

Thank you
Nicola

[npg]

The denoiser slider was a compromise we had to make when we only had our in-house "Vantage" denoiser. This denoiser works well while moving around (pretty stable and sharp image), but it doesn't work well when you let samples accumulate and it has some serious artifacts. This is why we added this slider to blend between the raw and denoised image.

When we later added the AI denoiser this slider lost its use because the result of the AI denoiser does not have serious artifacts and blending with the raw image only adds noise to the image. This is why we replaced the slider with a simple on/off button in this mode. This was done several versions ago, I think, definitely not in 1.7.0.

It's important to note that the nvidia AI denoiser does not have a "strength" option or similar. This is because it's not algorithmic, it's just a magic neural net

[nicola_barbano]

Hi Nikola,

Thank you for letting me know and clarification!
Oh sorry I did not see the button on/off in the previous version. I found that now with Nividia AI in my latest animation done in the previous version the "denoising" worked better. Especially on trees leaves. Now I have a bit more "staines".

Thank you
Nicola

[npg]

I don't think we've made changes to how we use the AI denoiser recently, but we've added normal mapping in this release. So if you have normal maps in your scene this would affect the denoiser. We've noticed before that bump mapping that makes the normals look like noise "confuses" the denoiser and makes the area blurrier, so it could be a similar situation with a newly enabled normal map if the camera is at such a distance that the normals of adjacent pixels all look random.

The other thing that could affect the AI denoiser result is the nvidia driver as this is where it's implemented and they sometimes update it (not every driver, I think), but this is probably not the case.

[nicola_barbano]

Oh ok! Understood thanks.
Probably are the normal and bump maps in the leaves materials from Cosmos Tree. In the distance they are very blurred unfortunately.

Thank you
Nicola