Sources of Noise and the Denoiser

[scrappydog1958]

What are the first order sources of noise in a VRAY render? How does the denoiser functions work to eliminate them?

Thomas

[konstantin_chaos]

Hi scrappydog1958,

Most of the material and lighting effects in V-Ray will produce noise without sufficient sampling.
This includes:

• Blurry shadows
• Global illumination (the Brute Force engine)
• Blurry material reflections and refractions
• Raytraced subsurface scattering
• Volumetric environment fog
• etc.

The good news is you can control the quality of all by just changing the Quality slider value.
There is no manual tweaking of individual effects quality required.

As for the Denoiser:
There are two denoising engines at your disposal - V-Ray Denoiser, NVIDIA AI.
The NVIDIA denoiser is very quick but not that accurate.
It's a good idea to use it during interactive rendering with the Update Effects slider set to Rapid.
The V-Ray Denoiser on the other hand is great for production final frame rendering.
It will remove noise while preserving texture and geometry details.
You can read more about the Denoiser in the docs page.

Regards,
Konstantin