Denoiser with Bake to Texture possible with VRay 5?

[dreidesign]

Just wanted to ask if this option was added to VRay 5? I thought that I've read something like that a while ago, but was looking in Max and couldnt find any option.

[nikoleta.garkova]

Hi dreidesign

Apologies for the delay - this is not yet possible within 3ds Max and the topic has been previously discussed here. This has been logged as a request in our internal system (id number: VMAX-5061) - I'll bump it and our devs will check if a solution could be found.

[robdeja]

Is there any news on this?
I'm doing a lot more texture baking these days and being able to denoise would be super useful.

[nikoleta.garkova]

I'm afraid not, but I'll add your request to the list as well.

[Dave_Wortley]

+10000000!

[^Lele^]

How do you see the denoising process for textures happen (where one has no noise level, normal or pPos REs, f.e.) in the VFB while baking, as opposed to a post-process?
Why not use vdenoise.exe?

[Dave_Wortley]

There are a few passes missing to make vdenoise work properly.

[^Lele^]

Vdenoise still denoises without the added passes, for whatever the result is worth (with one of three engines.).
My question is why expect a different behaviour when rendering textures, which will miss the same passes.

[robdeja]

Thanks for the responses guys,

VDenoise didn't really seem to do much denoising when I run the bakes through it.
Topaz Denoise does a decent job at denoising but it introduces artefacts around the edges of each UV island because it has a detail enhancement that can't be turned completely off.

I don't think I'm in any position to say how denoise should happen, I'm not a Chaos software developer, I'm just asking if it can happen. I have no idea what's possible, maybe it's not!
(Could extra bake passes be exposed to Bake To Texture that can be used to run through Vdenoise to aid the denoise? Is it possible for the denoise to happen "behind the scenes" and a denoised bake element be exposed to Bake To Texture that just outputs the result before render complete?)

At this point in time, I am personally most interested in denoising the baked lightmaps (VRayRawTotalLightingMap) which I use in WebGL.
VRayRawTotalLightingMap and the VRayCompleteMap would probably be my two most used VRay bake elements that I'd like denoising if it's possible.

If/when VRay can bake a full set of PBR textures (metallic!), then I might be asking for more bake elements to be denoised

[^Lele^]

Bah me, total rewrite.

So, the offline vDenoise works just fine with color images only, and works fine with UV island edges. (see attached.).
The only thing to manually specify is the noise level.

[robdeja]

Thanks for investigating Lele.
Maybe I give the vdenoise another go next time I'm in the situation to need it.
I didn't very good results when I last tried but I did have a lot more lighting/shadow detail and many more islands than your example so maybe it had a hard time with my case specifically (or I misconfigured the noise level).

[^Lele^]

Please share with me/support whichever case isn't working right, so we can see practical limitations to whatever was put in place (f.e. edge detection without added REs), and ideally make it better.

[matanov]

robdeja what kind of denoisers you think you'll use for this one - only V-Ray's? What about the others that are more fit for IPR (Open Image and NVIDIA)? Also what other kind of options that you can find in the regular Denoiser RE will you need?