Ocean skyline noise

[jstrob]

For the video without noise it's a plane with vraydisplacementmod. So you mean vraydispmod is flattening the plane at the horizon? But shouldn't vray resolve the noise no matter what's causing it?

[Ivaylo Katev]

But shouldn't vray resolve the noise no matter what's causing it?

well, this is not easy in some cases. the noise is caused by the distribution of the normals, in phoenix solution the "glossines" is lower, i.e. the normals have bigger dispersion than vray's normals. this leads to bigger probability some of the reflected rays to hit the sun and to produce very bright pixel. you have similar problem when rendering semi glossy materials. actually the real sea also has noise when the sun is near to the horizon.
my advice: try to play with the "max ray intens" parameter, it limits the contribution of the rays. when a single ray hits the sun, it contributes very big number, and even many samples with lower result can't suppress the contribution of this single ray. that's why you can set a limit to the ray contribution.

[jstrob]

Well my solution for ocean shots is now to use a plane with vray displacementmod but if I have time I will create a test scene one day to see if the phoenixfd ocean can be used without noise.