Low-Light Arnold Renderings Are Just Noise & Fireflies

[saintr]

Hi gang,

Apologies in advance. I'm returning to 3DS Max after a 10-year hiatus and am trying to do a simple interior lighting study for a client and using Arnold in the 2021 version. I have a low-light interior scene and followed all of Jose M. Elizardo's lighting and denoising tutorials but nothing is improving these (bumped up direct & indirect illumination and specular sampling) and tried the denoiser (Optix just prevents anything from rendering). They just look like pointillist paintings. Attaching the file and a render pass. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Bob

[madsd · Accepted solution]

I deleted your lights and all materials, there was a lot of unoptimal things.
Scrapped your environment and render settings tweaked a bit, lights have 3 samples.

It renders in a couple of minutes without using a denoiser, and is a good starting point.
Attached scene

[saintr]

Awesome, thanks. Will try to hash out the low-level lighting solution from here.

[madsd]

Use Arnold lights if you want to tinker with artificial lights like spots and so forth.
The 4 top windows are connected so you can just edit 1 and all other windows follow, you can dial them down, give them some blue, add some yellowish spots for evening.

Not entirely sure what lowlight is but I guess something of that nature.

Use physical materials and OSL or Arnold shaders, avoid the old legacy maps if you can, they bring nothing good to the table.