Denoise and multilayered EXRs

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max Issues
1

Hi,

We are trying to get Vray Denoiser to work in our pipeline, but this involves a few challenges.

We noticed that as the tooltip says, when we apply the denoiser while using a color mapping the resulted elements have a big difference in brightness.
To over come that, we thought we would only use Vray denoiser to denoise the beauty pass (RGB) and use the raw (not denoised) render elements to comp additionally (to which we might apply a post process denoiser like neat denoiser if needed)
The issue is that while we save to a layered exr, using the denoiser it saved out the denoised beauty pass and that’s great, but how do we do to extract the other layers from the layered exr?
Vrimg2exr works great but that needs a vrimg in stead of a exr as a input file.

Is there any cmd tool that could extract all the layers from a exr and save them to seperate EXRs?
Or is there a way to pipe in a vrimg to the denoiser but saves it as exr?
If so them we would use the vdenoise to save out the beauty denoised and the VRimg2exr to extract the other passes.

The whole purpose of this is because we use After Effects and we can’t use any layered EXRs and we can’t use linear out (otherwise denoising the elements with vdenoise would be the way to go).

Thanks
Stan

2

I thought you didn’t use any post at all, silly me.

Regardless, the latest Ae seems to sport proEXR in its basic package:
​https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using//preparing-importing-3d-image-files.html#importing\_and\_using\_3d\_files\_from\_other\_applications

3

:slight_smile:
We extensively use post in our production pipeline, but for my personal projects I try to avoid using them.

I was aware of AE supporting layered EXRs natively, but we can’t them in production for two reasons :
1) Extracting a layer is a real hassle and is prompt to user errors.
2) it’s tremendously more heavy (to work with) than single layered EXRs.

Alternatively, if there is a way to get the exact same maths applied in post on a linear image than what the Reinhard does, then we could export to linear from Vray and have the denoiser denoise all the passes.

4

Ah ha,
I just did few tests and it seems that denoising the elements is actually denoising each element internally to re-build the beauty.

Is there any way to save those elements denoised? Even if it saves the file back to a layered exr?

5

For the moment no, there is no way to save the denoised elements except RGB, this will be possible for future version though.