The newest daily build of Corona Renderer (20.02.2020) features a new adaptive environment sampler, which is enabled by default. It greatly improves image quality in areas where direct environment lighting is visible and should remove the need for portals in most scenes: - The difference is mostly visible when using an HDRI for environment lighting.
There is also a difference when using Corona Sun+Sky, mostly in cases where the sun is not the main source of scene illumination (if strong sunlight shines into the room through a window, the improvement probably won’t be that visible).
When using a solid color for the environment lighting, there will be no difference.
Generally, this does not improve rendering scenes with Sun+Sky or solid color environment, because those are already greatly optimized.
To compare the new and old enviro sampler:
Method 1 (using two Corona versions):
Render your original scene using Corona Renderer 5 - Download | My Chaos - this will give you an image with the old enviro sampler
Render the same scene using this newest daily build - this will give you an image with the new enviro sampler
Do not change any render settings between the two renderings!
Update: the below Method 2 is not valid any more, because in the latest daily builds of Corona Renderer 6, portals are completely ignored by the Corona core. Method 2 (using a single Corona version):
Under “Lights” switch “Enviro sampler” from “Adaptive sampler” to “NormalDep Compensated”
Render your image - this will give you an image with the old enviro sampler
Do not change any other render settings between the two renderings!
Note 1: the tests can be repeated with and without portals used in your scene. Note 2: it makes most sense to compare renderings using the time limit - e.g. rendering the same scene with 10 minutes time limit with the old and new sampler. Note 3: to quickly switch between two versions of Corona, or even launch two 3ds Max instances running different Corona versions at the same time, you can use this simple trick: https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/12000066819
Are you sure that this is correctly tested? Did you just switch from V5 to the daily build? Honestly I would not expect such huge improvement, but if it really helped so much - great!
I’m sure, same scene, test done this morning. Results are spectacular, I agree!
I made this scene this morning in previous daily build (2020-02-17) and rendered - 10 minutes. Then I installed newest daily (2020-03-20) and rerendered the scene. I made no changes at all. It was same scene and settings, the time was limited to 10 minutes in both tests.
PS. Car is corona proxy. For the floor and walls I used materials from new Corona Material Library.
You don’t have to worry about them. With the new sampler, you don’t have to use portals. There may be still some edge cases where a scene with portals will render slightly better than without them (with the new sampler), but the difference won’t be as dramatic as with the old sampler.
I rendered the above scene in V6 with portals and results where even cleaner, but as maru said, the difference isn’t dramatic - not worth a hassle with portals in new scenes.
No, enviroment sampler should be set to adaptive sampler. It should be set like this by default, even when you open older scenes. Normaldep compensated is an older sampler.
Holy crap, this new adaptive sample is blowing the previous one out of the water. I have only done one test on a small image for now, but the results are night and day. In the example 10 minute render below, v5 got to 8.46% noise level. the v6 daily got down to 0.43% noise level! FYI, the black areas are a hold out I setup to speed up rendering.
Also not to mention the speed ups in the geometry stage. This is insane, my renders are going to be so much damn faster. I am very impressed.
Yeah, I’m now finding that my earlier excitement is probably overstated too much. I mean, I think it is an improvement, just not to the extent I was reacting to before.
In the images below, the first image is a previous frame I rendered on one of my Threadrippers. I then rendered the same frame on my workstation (my render boxes are tied up currently). I still see a fair amount of noise in the new adaptive sampler. Is noise being calculated differently now?
I should have put this info in the images:
01 - v5
02 and 03 - v6 daily
