Animation rendering noise

[PGD]

Any tips on how to improve or reduce the noise within the trees and planting on the animation here?

This is a 1min per frame render - default vray settings
VrayDenoiser on strong

It looks better now it's been through Media encoder again to generate this short clip tbh.

I guess a longer render time is one answer.
Just checking the Opacity Map Filtering, setting to None in the hope that helps. It was at 'Summerd area' for the type of tree which is causing noise.


God, it's embarrasing posting my work here it's so bad next to all yours! And I've been doing this for years!

[^Lele^]

Leave the opacity map filtered (ideally, use a vraybitmap at defaults), and set the opacity for the leaves of that type of tree to Clip mode.

[seandunderdale]

render times aside...its a little distracting when you have twins in your shot.

[PGD]

Hey folks,

Another project, but same super noise issue. The grass looks more like a disco ball

Can anyone suggest any tips please? Litteraly anything to ease the searching and testing would be good.

Do you switch to bucket rendering? With what, 8 max subdivs? How long per frame do you like to work to, roughly?

Settings here were: Progressive @1min per frame, VrayDenoiser on strong



Looks horrendous doesnt it!

[^Lele^]

It's sampling.
You need to *not* use the time limit, but rather a noise limit.
Then you can denoise it more effectively, even for higher noise levels overall.

[PGD]

Ok, with Noise threshold?

So:
Max rendertime 0.0
Noise threshold 0.05?

I don't mind a bit of noise because clearly it'll still look poor as I've done it lol

[seandunderdale]

You're trying to have your cake and eat it....so to speak. You want clean noise free renders, but also 1 minute render times. Those two things, for complex scenes, are in opposition. Denoiser doesnt magically clean up a render, but it will push an almost clean render over the finish line. I would test 10 frames using different time limits and see what you can get away with. Render off the same10 frames at 2.5mins, 5mins, 7.5 mins and 10mins. Render that overnight, and youll know what looks passable with denoiser. Vray is very simplified now in terms of getting things to clean up...you just have to let it spend more than 1 minute.

I would leave the noise threshold at default. I do this for animations as it means once I know how long I need to get a clean image (5mins for example) I can leave everything else alone, and I also know how long my sequence will take. The gotcha here can be if your scene changes alot and something comes into frame that cant be cleaned up in that time. In that case I go back and re-render parts with higher settings. But overall I find this can be a useful way to not have a render get stuck on a few frames and bottleneck overnight.

[PGD]

Yeah I get that seandunderdale - I want it all! Or rather the architects do.

Trouble is they want me to do the images because they look better than Lumion (or at least the images we can get out of Lumion anyway) but move on to the animation and they want that to be done over night too. It just can't be can it.

So, set noise threshold at 0.01, and run tests (I think that was the default was)

[seandunderdale]

Its very scene dependent...on shots with low frequency detail you can get away with higher noise thresholds (0.02 or even higher), but your scene with grass and leaves will always confuse the denoiser if it isnt cleaned up sufficiently. Youre basically not feeding the denoiser enough data. There are no real work arounds in that sense, apart from changing how your scene is built...using textures and relying on diffuse maps rather than modelling geometry grass and trees, but you lose realism. You could possibly split the scene up into render layers....grass and trees into a high settings layer, and the rest of the scene in another layer with a render override to render faster, since you may not need the clean up so much.