VRay Denoiser doesn't work when Memory Framebuffer is disabled

[TubeSmokeGuy]

Hi!

The Title says it.
It seems that the VRay Denoiser doesn't work or creates proper "effectsResult" channel, when Memory Framebuffer is disabled.

Can anyone confirm? Is this a known limitation / issue?

Thank you and greetings!

[hermit.crab]

The denoiser cannot be used without a memory frame buffer. There should be a warning in the log about it.

[TubeSmokeGuy]

Oh okay, thanks for that info. Too bad that no one recognizes the VRay log when it's a network job. Unfortunately the image resolution is that big, that we get a memory overflow when memory framebuffer is enabled, so we are forced to turn it off. Are there any plans, that VRay Denoise will work without memory framebuffer in the future?

[^Lele^]

There is a vdenoise.exe inside the \bin folder for offline denoising.
It's also the only way to multi-frame denoise, currently, for *much* sharper and stable results.

[TubeSmokeGuy]

Thx Lele! I know this stand-alone exe, but naaaaaah, I'm no friend of manual post apps and steps. I hope its a big "currently" and you could add that the denoise will automatically be applied after rendering. Maybe the denoiser can grab the image from disk, denoise and overwrite. Or what about a Nuke plug-in which offers a node, that runs the stand-alone denoiser in background and works when the input has all the required channels?

[^Lele^]

The standalone denoiser application has a GUI, you won't need to even browse to the folder, as it's in the start menu.
The whole point of writing a big image (with perhaps many REs) directly to disk, with the memory-less VFB option, is because one expects to *not* have the RAM to have the file loaded concurrently with the DCC app and loaded scene.
If it were us loading said image inside max, after the render was done, we'd be countering the very option.
As denoising itself takes more memory, it may well lead to exceptionally low performance (if one ends up swapping to disk. ugh.), or even crashes.
If your image is exceptionally big, you may also want to consider not denoising it with the GPU (i.e. hardware acceleration), depending on how much VRAM your card has.

My "currently" was for multi-frame denoising only.
That, provided one had the ram, could potentially be made in the VFB (storing the necessary frames in memory.), but that too would be quite messy for workflow (what if one renders frames on different clients?).

There is simply no way around the standalone denoiser, for a selected group of cases, unfortunately.