So… this happens to be a hot topic lately and we could not let it pass by; the next service pack of V-Ray will include a denoising tool and I need some volunteers to check what we have so far and give me some feedback before we go ahead and integrate it into V-Ray itself.
This is still a proof of concept, so it’s not very user friendly, but should be workable. You will have to install a new version of V-Ray because the denoiser requires a render element that we did not have so far (the noise level for the pixels in the image, as computed by the image sampler). I only have builds for Max 2014-2016.
first test with vdenoiser
its mostly a direct lit scene BF/LC noise threshold 0.01 AA 42 with noise in refracted and shaded areas
attached original rendering / mild mode/ elements mode radius=3 threshold=0.002 noiselevel=0.3
it’s a real timesaver with a noise threshold that high it cleaned up very well,
increasing the noise threshold just to clean up small shaded areas would have taken double the rendering time.
yeah i was quite surprise that the grass was kept well,
but the tree in the reflection was better in when i used the elements mode.
i think i will be using the element mode all the time i have more control and better results.
this quite a good denoiser for an alpha.
great work
Yeah, I was wondering which mode to leave on by default. Per-element denoising definitely keeps details better for archviz type images, but is somewhat slower.
I think speed can be disregarded generally speaking. I mean we’re talking minutes aren’t we? Do we have tests with some times already for bigger images (6k+)? In my opinion for full size images everything under an hour is acceptable.
i did test a 5K image with elements denoising it took 43.84 sec on a double processor xeon E5-2620 v3 @2.4ghz, the vrimg file was 1.20gb.
i took at least 10 sec to load the file.
That’s blazing. Although your images propably are sampled good already, right? For preview purposes I mostly use around 0.03 - 0.07. It would be interesting to see how it behaves with those values, since especially 0.03 is a good value generally for a fast rendering, not toooo noisy image as compared to the cleanliness of a 0.01 or 0.005 image for final quality.
I’ve found that 0.02-0.03 generally works well; 0.04-0.05 begins to stretch things too far a little bit and the result are not as good. But why don’t you get the denoiser and find out
Denoiser is returning very soft fur. Acceptables values i found are very low : -mode=mild -radius=0.7 -noiseLevelMultiplier=0.25
Maybe a blending between frames higher than 1 would help ?
A question i’m asking : do i need to render original with many noise (like Altuse Denoiser advice) or should i try to render with productions settings and the denoise will clean the residual noise ?
BTW the denoise process is really fast & worth it ! (~30s on 50Mo vrimg)
Is that good or bad? I know some people have been begging for soft fur… Do you have any images that you can show?
Maybe a blending between frames higher than 1 would help?Not much in terms of softness, but you can try to denoise per elements (as opposed to single pass).
A question i’m asking : do i need to render original with many noise (like Altuse Denoiser advice) or should i try to render with productions settings and the denoise will clean the residual noise?The intent of our denoiser is primarily to help clean up residual noise in images that are already decently sampled. You could use settings that are slightly lower quality than your usual production settings (f.e. if you use noise threshold 0.01, you could use 0.02 and denoise afterwards).
No i don’t want soft fur or texture, i need to keep the sharpness we aim to.
I’m rendering a ‘production settings’ animation, i’ll try to denoise it per elements indeed.
Trying to add some images, don’t know if it’s going to be speaking…
original medium render
default denoise
updated settings denoise
I did per-element denoising on a 900 frame animation. I rendered at half my normal production clr: threshold for this test and used the vdenoiser it only took a few hours or so to denoise the 900 frames and gave stunning results similar to my production clr: thr and cutting down the render time in HALF!
Now how do I batch convert to EXR? I’m getting this error with the VRImage to EXR converter. I’ve set it up to 20000 always errors out with this below.
Increase buffer size or use -bufsize 0 to load the whole image.
change the input file mode from single to multiple,the select the input and output directories
no need to change the buffer size, i left it to default 500 & it worked fine.
I’m sure these things will get addressed. but having to save the output through the V-ray - Frame buffer tab is a bit of a hassle, I cant use that standard batch render dialog even though .vrimg is option to save, Backburner gives some output errors.
denoise per elements should be default it wicked fast.
This will be essential for animations were we are trying to shave every second off a frame.
