Hi All,
I’m creating an egg crate suspended ceiling for an office, its fine close to the camera but gets increasingly noisy further away. Is there a way to improve the quality?
Render quality is on Ultra, 4k res.
Thanks
Hmm thats a wierd one. Could it be the reflectionmap of the material making it more visible from distance? Try removing any reflection or reflection map..
How is your scene lit?
Nothing complex - just some 600x600mm flat panel lights which are a basic ‘self illuminated’ texture and a few ies spots.
I’ve tried various settings, tried changing various materials, tried diasbling lights etc and the issue persists. I wonder if its something to do with the oblique nature of the geometry? Each ceiling panel has at least 720 faces and there are hundreds of panels in the scene and in the distance all that small geometry is going to be bit visually fudged together perhaps.
I’ll have to go back to trying to do it with a cut out texture or a displacement or something like that.
I’d imagine there are a number of challenges contributing to this.
Emissive surfaces are notorious for causing this type of noise in most renderers. The issue is that the number of light rays they contribute to the scene is relatively low, which makes them difficult for the renderer to sample efficiently. Because of this, they’re usually best avoided as the primary method of illumination in a room.
My first suggestion would be to introduce more direct light objects. These will generate more samples and help average out particularly bright points that might be causing the noise.
You could try placing rectangular lights in addition to the self-illuminating textures.
You could even increase the number of light sources — for example, placing four smaller rect lights in the same position where you currently have one ceiling light. This increases the number of contributing rays even further and could help reduce noise.
This may not help and placing so many lights in a scene comes with other problems common that rasterisation based renderers have, especially enscape where there is a lot of behind the scenes optimisation going on to keep things running and stopping things functioning.
Thanks for the thoughts @adam_fairclough
I’ve tried adding rectangle light entities to the main lighting panels (and dropped the lm value of the self illuminated texture) but doesn’t seem to have made any difference, also tried sticking a load of sphere entities around - which I’d say improved things a tiny bit but the wash of light around the scene is then all wrong. Forgot to say, the majority of the scene is lit by the sun through the windows if that has any bearing.
I do think its just the interplay of light and shade over such small/numerous geometry at an oblique angle where its unable to resolve satisfactorily. Works fine if use a standard ceiling tile.
Ah well!
Maybe it’s something else out of our hands that is causing that - I tried banging together a similar scene and got a little of it but it’s hard to know without having an identical setup.
I guess the nature of the celing is that it is only being lit by indirect light as no lights point at it, so this is inherently noisier.
Did you try turning all the hardware accelerated ray-tracing? That switches to a different GI system and can look better on occasion?
Yep, I tried the various ray tracing options on and off. No real difference.
What I’ve ended up doing is a cutout texture, but as that renders far too thin on its own, I’ve duplicated and offset the component a number of times to give it some depth (assume no way to extrude/displace a cutout texture?!). The gap is small enough to not be visible.
Feels a bit inelegant and doesn’t look as good actual geometry, but it will do!
