Quick Preview Slider

[glorybound]

I would love to be able to simply slide a slider until my render is clean. Maybe, put a box around a problematic area and slide until it's clean; that would be your settings. Wishful thinking? Or, maybe is this what progressive is trying to do?

[super gnu]

for me, thats exactly what progressive does. set no time limit, set a nice noise threshold (0.004-0.006) if its a scene that needs lots of aa, use a low min shading rate, if its more biased towards shading/glossies/shadows, use a higher msr... set global subdivs to 0, hit render.. stop when it looks good.

for faster preview rendering, set a higher noise thres.

[glorybound]

Maybe, I'll try it. Last time I tried it something wasn't supported, so I bailed. Is Forest Pro supported? I think my issue was MultiTexture.

[super gnu]

i didnt realise that there were compatibility issues with progressive.. i didnt think it had any special requirements/limitations beyong being a touch slower and needing a bit more ram. ? . are you not thinking of vray RT?

[glorybound]

Maybe, it could have been RT. If progressive isn't faster with better results, I am not sure I am getting the concept. I guess the only what I can jump that hurdle is to try it.

i didnt realise that there were compatibility issues with progressive.. i didnt think it had any special requirements/limitations beyong being a touch slower and needing a bit more ram. ? . are you not thinking of vray RT?

[vlado]

There are no compatibility issues with the progressive sampler (there are only two things not supported - sharpening AA filters, and deep image output).

V-Ray RT is another matter; you would only use it if you need the interactivity or the GPU support.

Best regards,
Vlado

[super gnu]

for me the good thing with progressive ( i find going back to adaptive annoying now) while its a little slower, its simpler to set up, and you know that all the pixels will arrive at the chosen noise threshold if you leave it long enough. With adaptive, once youve chosen your settings, it renders, then its done. if there is too much noise, you have to go back and do the whole image again.

with progressive, if you set a nice threshold you know is good enough (but not so low that it has to refine all the pixels for ever) then it will work on each pixel, until it is at that threshold, then focus its efforts on the noisier areas.. end result is it speeds up as it goes, progressively working on less and less of the image. if there is still a noisy bit in the image, you can be sure all your cpu cycles are going on that spot, and it will get clean if you wait (assuming your threshold was low enough)

[AlexP]

But, how do you approach rendering a series of stills overnight for example? Set a time limit for each? If so, then same problem as adaptive in the end no? (in that you'll need to re-render whole image if too much noise)
Adaptive is more predictable time-wise imo, but I much prefer the render process of progressive.

[super gnu]

obviously if you only have one machine, then that is a problem, yes. if you can assign one or more machines to an image, you are fine.

you do of course get an idea of how long a given render takes after a few tests of course. if a half res test is clean/finished after 1 hr, you know a full res will take 4 hrs.. so set a time limit of 5 hrs.. for example..

it might be interesting (although i dunno how it could possibly work) if you could render all the images in parallel on a machine..sp they would all still be going in the morning. but the practicalities of that mean its not gonna happen.