Denoiser Upgrade - Smudgy patches

[philip_nel]

Often get blurry/smudgy artifacts when rendering interior animations - not such an issue with exteriors, although I also spot it. Especially on large flat surfaces like floors/pavements/asphalt.
As far as I understand it's the Nvidia denoiser that causes this - as soon as you untick "reduce flickering", the following image in the sequence is crisp.
But of course the flickering makes the sequence unusable.

[npg]

There are a few things to try here, in order to find what causes the denoiser to blur those areas. First, try rendering the same thing without bump mapping. Sometimes the bumped normals are noise-like and this "confuses" the AI denoiser. If it isn't that, then try setting the light tree samples to 16 - this is under Advanced in the Lights panel. This should reduce the noise in interior scenes with dozens of light sources. Finally, try increasing the samples per frame.

We are aware of the quality issues that sometimes occur with the AI denoiser, but there's not much we can do until an improved version of the denoiser is provided. It's a "black box" without any settings - we just input a couple of render elements.

[philip_nel]

Thanks for the reply npg.
I've played around with all those settings you mentioned, didn't fix the smudgy areas on floor.

Important to mentioned though is that I worked with version 1.8.1 - this morning I saw there's an upgrade available and installed 1.8.2.
Did the same test and denoiser looks MUCH better - also great to see that denoiser can be applied on final pass...should save lots of time!

[npg]

Interesting. I think the only relevant change we made in 1.8.2 is that we improved denoising of reflections. So was it the reflections that cleared up, not the texture of the floor itself?

[philip_nel]

It's a matt stone tile finish with very faint reflections - All I know is that the results are much better!

[npg]

We made changes to what texture level of detail we use when the "dynamic textures" option is enabled. Maybe the result would be the same in 1.8.1 and 1.8.2 when this is disabled (making the engine load full resolution textures for everything).