VDenoise tool and necessary RE

Question 1:
I can’t seem to make Denoiser RE to write out the channels necessary to use with vdenoise tool. If set to “Only Generate Render Elements” nothing seems to happen.
The RE needed for denoise appear in the Frame buffer inside Houdini, but are not saved.

What is the trick?

Question 2:
For my use case, I prefer the Intel Open Image Denoise. Works fine if Denoise element is in “Show Denoiser element” mode. But if I try to use it from vdenoise tool I get this enlightening message:


error: [denoise] 2: buffer region out of range
Denoising is aborted!

The same source exr file works ok with vdenoise tool in Vray mode. What exactly is the problem?​

Hey,

I’m assuming this is about Solaris - I just tested on my end, and the render elements are properly generated and saved to disk. Running the vdenoise tool however does throw the same error for me, and I assume it is because of the missing default RGBA channel. I could not get the tool to work even if I rename the Beauty (from V-Ray Standard Render Vars) to “RGBA” so I’ve messaged internally to get help from a developer.
I’ll ping you as soon as I know more.

Meanwhile, if Q1 is still valid for you - could you please give me your exact build (Toolbar → V-Ray → About V-Ray) so I can investigate the missing output in “Only Generate Elements” mode.

Best regards!

Vray info:
V-Ray for Houdini number:22719 hash:d22d004 from 15 Jun 2024 02:01
V-Ray Core 6.20.09 from 11 Jun 2024​

Here is a link to an absolutely default houdini file that does not save denoiser related channels, only shows them in VFB
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xbp18…=egljdtfm&dl=0

@Gosho.Genchev , were you able to look at the scene above and find out why it wouldn’t save out vdenoise-related REs?

Ah, my apologies, I forgot to reply. Thanks for pinging me.

With your scene, the “issue” should be straightforward to go around - simply remove the ${AOV} tag from the image file output path. This tag is telling V-Ray to save separate EXR files for each AOV present in your scene. For whatever reason, it does not save the Denoiser AOVs as separate files on disk. I’ll check with our developers if we can print some warning message in the GUI as you probably don’t even want that to happen anyway.

I’ve also attached a simple video with the steps.

Best regards!
denoise_aov_tag.zip (8.36 MB)

Cool, I wouldn’t have guessed this was the problem. Hats off to your troubleshooting skills!

Do I understand correctly that now I can render only to multichannel EXRs, no way to force it to separate files?

It’s possible to rebuild the needed elements from internal V-Ray AOVs but frankly, it might be more trouble than it’s worth. We’ll sort this out, and I’ll ping you once we have a fix in the builds.

Best regards!

Thanks, @Gosho.Genchev !

Is this fixed in the latest build? Or is there a workaround? I’m trying to use the vdenoise tool and I’m getting the same error.

Hey @RichardBlank ,

We haven’t done any changes here but as a workaround - you can name your beauty output “RGB” - that will allow the standalone vdenoise.exe tool to recognize it. I’ve attached an example using the Intel denoiser.

Best regards!
scene.zip (151 KB)

Ok great! Thanks!

I’m still getting the buffer region out of range​ error? Are you using exr in your test?