What % are you guys finding works enough for your projects before using the denoiser?
I’ll add pictures soon, but it looks like we can get away with rendering to ~5% noise and using .6 on the denoise for our 720p animations.
You just shared my personal defaults 
Good Luck
5% is the limit if you have not strong DOF or MBlur. Otherwise, you need < 2%, I think.
Anyway, for indoor architectural animation, a value between 2%-5% is good enough =)
Denoise? 0.75 is the limit, in my animation test.
For still, better 0.5/ 0-6
When you’re sharing those denoise numbers, are you talking about denoise radius or denoise blending?
just blending, haven’t played with the radius yet
Denoise amount. =)
I must admit i’m rarely touch denoise radius too, although it helps to find better balance between noisy and too plastic looking image. Let’s hope that someday we’ll get denoising that is fully adjustable after rendering. If i’m not mistaken, it was said that it could be delivered in 1.5 already.
@ Rawalanche
do you use the same values for interiors and exteriors?
I didn’t have the chance to test it extensively for interiors but for exteriors, I had to turn it off. Had a fine bump map on the building that needed to be “noisy”, and denoiser made a mess on the grass.
Anyone else had similar exterior experience?
I love denoiser so much (thanx corona!!),
I always use 4% with denoise blend 0.6
Denoise radius is 0.6 too, because I experienced that with 1.0 it hurts my tiny leather bump texture a little bit. but I don’t know is it still happening in 1.4 or not.
What is the relationship between radius and resolution ? Would use guys still use smaller than 1 radius for high-res renders ? Would there be any possible drawback (splotching?) ?
I have no idea about that, but imho it is related. I think I wont use smaller than 1 for denoiser radius for more than 4k renders. but I never get any project with more than 4k render.
When you guys say 5%, are you talking about a setting of .05 in the Noise Level Limit under the pass limit? And then say .6 for Denoise Amount and 1.0 for Radius?
5 in the noise level limit (it’s 0-100%), yes to the rest.
Something I would mention is if you I’m rendering below 1080p, I use a noise limit closer to 3%
Not 0.05 but “5”. It´s % in UI
Good Luck
Got it, just read it on the help desk also. I suppose the larger the resolution the longer it takes even if the noise limit % is higher anyway of course. I tried setting the limit to 10 on a 5,000 pixel render and it was taking way too long (as I’m just doing tests), so I changed the resolution to 3,000 x 2,000. Still trying to figure out what settings to use for quick testing purposes and how this denoising works.
I like to region render the noisiest part of my image until it has enough passes that it looks clean enough, from there, I’d render the whole frame with that many passes and check what noise % that ends up being (noise % isn’t accurate with region render). With noise reduction you can work back from that % if the full frame took too long, or just use that % and put noise reduction on top of that for an even cleaner image.
Do you need to set a pass or time limit also? Or just set the Noise limit to 5/10/etc and let it go without the other limits set?
You don’t have to, nor should you really, the render stops at the first limit it hits. It would never reach 5% noise if you had the pass limit at 1 or the time limit at 1sec, etc.