Quick 3.3 Report....

[Morne]

This is a video that Vlado made for 3.2, which from what I can tell is very similar to the default workflow for 3.3. You basically control the quality of your scene with 3 settings: min/max subdivs in the sampler, color threshold and, minimum shading rate. In your video your are using clean mostly flat surfaces, as Vlado mentions, you need to up you MSR to clean up some of that noise without going overboard on them color threshold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKaKvWqTFlw

Yes but sinse then, Vlado also mentioned for 3.3 not to touch MSR too much and he is considering removing it from the UI

[munderwood]

I would guess that he meant removing it from global render setup window while still allowing users to change it in the individual vray object properties. In some cases changing the MSR on a handful of objects will get you a much faster render that simply lowering the color threshold for the whole scene.

[NicoC]

Thank you again, Svetlozar :
One setting remains obscure to me: Filter Maps for GI (and its multiplier). The manual describes it as:
I mean, it's off by default, for speed apparently. So why would we set it on ? what does the multiplier really do ? why is it on by default ? why is the multiplier set to 5.0 by default ?

Thanks.

No one, please ?

[^Lele^]

It's been made quick enough that it can stay at its defaults.
It also helps reducing noise in the GI calculations in some cases.

[NicoC]

It's been made quick enough that it can stay at its defaults.
It also helps reducing noise in the GI calculations in some cases.

Hi Lele,

Thanks for your answer.
So that should be ON by default ? so the manual would deserve a little update sorry for insisting, but I hate not understanding something.

[Joelaff]

Filtering GI maps with a higher filter strength is something we discovered a little while back. For a lot of scenes it can provide a reduction in noise from GI. What it does is to further filter (blur) the textures in your scene when calculation Hi bounces. This averages out the color values in the GI slightly so that there is less variance from sample to sample. It will make the biggest difference if you have higher frequency textures, or HDR texture maps (yes, we use them sometimes) with a lot of contrast.

We used to do it by having separate objects to source GI that used blurred or lower resolution texture maps. Think of it like how you would lower the resolution of your HDRI to make it less noisy.

Have jot done extensive testing in 3.3, but in earlier versions we found 2-3 to be the optimal setting, which reduced noise, but had little effect on the image. I have left it at 5 in 3.3 because I have not had a scene where I felt I needed it lower.

[^Lele^]

Just remember to keep filtering active in your bitmaps!
The option is a multiplier, so bitmaps with a blur of 0.01, or no filtering, will still manage to be sharp in the GI (potentially increasing noise).
If one needs a sharp image, one should try the VRayHDRI loader, and its filtering options (much better than max's own at preserving detail.)