Struggling to cleanup noise in glossies

[Morne]

Hi all

I've hit a blank and cannot seem to find where I've missed something. I'm doing a upmarket club room and the ceiling has some aluminium on it. All objects in the scene has a thickness. I'm using LWF. My glossies especially the ceiling is noisy. I have some cove lighting around the ceiling in the form of geometry that has VRayLightMtl applied with subdivs set to 32 (also tried with 64 without a difference). Whole bunch of downlights in the form of VRayIES which has the famous "1589835-nice.IES" applied. I've tried 128,128,128 override material on all objects except ceiling. I've tried switching off the cove lights. I've set all lights to subdvis to 256 in light settings. I've pushed the render settings sky high without any visible improvements. Curtains are closed and enviroment is black (no sun in the scene even)

Anybody else have any ideas? I've never had problems like this in the past. This scene is with max 2011 and Vray 1.5 latest build.

Ceiling material settings diffuse and reflection = medium gray
glossy = 0.8
subdivs = 32 (tried 128 without any visible change)

adaptive dmc 1,4 ( tried 2,4 and also 2,8 )
noise thresh 0.005
AA tried = none, quadtratic, VRayLancosfilter (none has an effect on the ceiling noise)

IRmap tried preset as high as "Medium Animation". Check sample visibility checked
LC = 2000 subdivs, 0.006, screen. Prefilter tried 0, 10, 50, 100.

Render single frame of 720p animation (animation not done yet, but only cam will move)

I'm concerend about the scene since the override material (except ceiling) produce noise. When I dont have override I have 3 curved walls with glass beads floor to ceiling which could further give me headaches.

Any thoughts? (I can only provide a screenshot tonight) but it is for sure noise in the glossy.

O yes and I've also tried global subdivs miltiplier set to 4! which does nothing to clean up the noise but adds couple of years to the single frame rendering and also adds some extra grey hair on my head

[Deflaminis]

Maybe it's GI caustics or something? Try turning them off in the indirect illumination tab at the very top (refractive). There's a thread around here somewhere that shows how to go back to vray 1.0 sampling with Vray2, at least until the patch. Maybe this is related.

Follow this thread, maybe it's similar? http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...t=sampling+1.0

[Morne]

Maybe it's GI caustics or something? Try turning them off in the indirect illumination tab at the very top (refractive). There's a thread around here somewhere that shows how to go back to vray 1.0 sampling with Vray2, at least until the patch. Maybe this is related.

Follow this thread, maybe it's similar? http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...t=sampling+1.0

With this scene I'm not using VRay2.0. I'm using 1.5 latest build

[Deflaminis]

My fault, I see that now.

[windowlicker]

It would help to see some renders, to see what kind of noise you're talking about.
On the fly though, I'd say you need to enable subpixel mapping. Lots of bright materials reflecting each other can lead to unwanted bright pixels. Subpixel mapping usually takes care of that problem.

[Morne]

It would help to see some renders, to see what kind of noise you're talking about.
On the fly though, I'd say you need to enable subpixel mapping. Lots of bright materials reflecting each other can lead to unwanted bright pixels. Subpixel mapping usually takes care of that problem.

I'll post some renders tonight. It's not overbright as its on the ceiling. Even with the cove lighting switched off, it's still noisy. Also, with different camera exposures the noise still persists.

[Morne]

render samples

And here are some tests including times. My pc is a quadcore Intel 9550 2.8 with 8GB Ram. The general light is coming form the IES lights and thats why its still light in the shots where the VRayLightMtl lights are switched off.

The top 2 renders have the metal glossy ceiling clearly showing the noise (these were at 32 subdivs for glossiness material, 128 doesnt seem to make a difference except make it render forever)


Anybody have any clues?

[simmsimaging]

I'm not sure I'm totally following your setup - but did you try it with affect specular turned off for the IES lights? Might not be connected in this case but it has caused me noise issues before.
b

[Morne]

Hmmm I havent had problems with the IES lights before, but thanks Brett I'll take a look tonight with the setting you suggest and report back.

In the meantime, anybody else have some tips I can try out toghether with Brett's suggestion?

[themaxxer]

I also have problems to get clean glossies in my renderings. I have made the environment variable, but it seems it doesn't work every time.
I usually render with solidrocks, but it isn't funny anymore, because of the noise. it seems that the vraylight in skylight mode generates more noise too.

best regards
themaxxer

[MoonDoggie]

Make sure that noise isn't coming from light, which you could cleanup with more light subdivisions in your light material direct illumination on subdivs. It's helpful to add the render elements VRayLighting, VRayReflection, VRaySpecular to determine which of the elements the noise is coming from. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to cleanup light noise thinking it was reflection noise.

32-64 reflection subdivs for the glossy material should do the trick.

[beestee]

Are you using SolidRocks?

If so, SolidRocks overrides all subdiv settings at rendertime and then switches them all back after rendering, so you can change the subdiv settings at the material level all you want and it won't mean a thing when you hit render in SR. The easiest way to fix this issue in this situation is to move the SR quality slider up to get more subdivs.

[Morne]

Hi Ben, no I'm not using solidrocks. Colin's idea sounds like a good one to me however. It's worth a try, but I don't think it's from the lights. As you can see in my render samples on page1, when I override the ceiling, the noise is gone completely.