variable noise threshold. possible?

[super gnu]

ok so i kinda said this as a joke in another thread, but the more i think about it, the more powerful i think it could be.

being able to vary the noise threshold over an image would be an incredibly powerful tool to optimise quality and rendertime.

im imagining a map slot next to the noise threshold. if you need more aa in the distance to fix shimmering trees, but dont need it in the foreground, just put a falloff map set to distance blend in the slot, and adjust the ranges.

need one specific area in a still to be sampled very well? paint a mask in photoshop.

you could extend it to an extra map slot in the vray material, if theres a map in there it overrides the global one. need more samples at the edges of an object? put a fallof set to fresnel in the "sample quality slot"

probably there is a simple reason why this is impossible or it'd be in there already?

im currently stuck needing masses of aa quality in the distance of a scene to fix shimmering trees. as a result im stuck with super oversampled motion blur and reflections in the foreground that take -forever- to render, and look fine with 1/4 the quality settings. something like this would speed up my renders enormously...

[vlado]

It is possible but it must be strictly a 2D map, so it will have to be a 2d gradient, not a falloff, for example.

Best regards,
Vlado

[super gnu]

ok, limits the usefulness -slightly- but still could be a big speed booster, could you forsee any issues with pre-rendering a z-depth pass and using that in the same way? edge aliasing etc? maybe if it was rendered at a higher resolution than the final render... actually thinking about it, an antialiased z-depth should be ok in this case.




id be over the moon if i could have this feature to play with.. im sure it would be a great tool to speed up rendering.