Too much denoiser

I’m having a problem with the denoiser, in the reference image you can see big patches of blurriness in the carpet and also on the cubical. What’s causing this and how do I fix it?

Can you tell us which nVidia driver version you are using ?
It is possible to send us a scene that reproduces this issue ?

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

I’m using driver 472.39 and I attached an image from the animation in my initial post, do you need more?

The scene file will help us determine what’s going on.
It could be just a part of the scene that reproduces the issue.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

How do I send that to you?

You can send it to the e-mail in my forum signature or to support.
You can use dropbox or similar if it’s too big.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

Those are two separate issues.

One is that there is noise-like bump mapping on these surfaces. This makes it hard for the AI denoiser and apparently it applies more blur. It may clean up with more samples. It’s also usually better at larger resolutions where the bump details are not so noise-like.

The other issue which we have mentioned previously on the forum is that in temporal mode (we use this for sequences to reduce flickering) it produces slightly less sharp images in general. You can check this by disabling bump mapping and rendering a still vs a mid-sequence frame.

Note that in either case, the AI denoiser is like a black box and it doesn’t really have parameters apart from the input image layers (raw rgb, albedo, normals, velocity). Pretty much all we can do is pass as clear input as possible (mostly concerns the rgb layer) and hope the magic neural net will spit out a nice image :slight_smile:

Thank you that was it!

There’s some strange glowing effect coming off the lights in the ceiling, bloom is turned off. I’ve tried raising the noise threshold level and it does seem to lessen but once I get to .008 Vantage just stops rendering.

I am not sure how the noise threshold can affect something like this.
Can you attach a screen-shot of the issue, I am not sure what you mean ?

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

How many samples are you using to render the image ?
If the image being denoised is too noisy, the AI denoised result will be blurry like this.
I can reproduce it here only while moving the camera, once you stop and let it accumulate some samples, the glow disappears.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

Your right it does disappear if the camera is still but this is a frame from the animation. I’m using all default settings in Vray GPU and in Vantage I’ve increased ambient light to 4 and GI to 4 also.

How many samples are you using for each frame ?
I guess increasing them will help solve the issue.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

In advanced scene settings the light cache is set to 256.

I mean the AA samples per pixel. See attached image.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

Where do I find that menu?

I thought you were using the Tools → High Quality Render command inside Vantage ?
How are you rendering the animation otherwise ?
Are you using the live link animation command ?
It has the same Samples option, but it defaults to just 10.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

I’m using the “Render animation via Live Link” button in 3d Studio.

In this case, the corresponding option is this one:

It defaults to just 10, which can easily lead to the issue you are seeing.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

Ah…then it’s 100.

Maybe try increasing the Samples somewhat.
Or try disabling Reduce flickering - in my tests this seems to get rid of the glow.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev