rendering quality question

[Anonymous]

I am trying to get away from Quicksilver and trying to use Arnold. Can someone tell me how to up the quality and get rid of the grainy effect?

Thanks

[madsd]

Sure,

The rule of thumb is, use as low Camera AA as possible, and increase the seperate samples as needed.

The general workflow to get clean and fast renders is as following:

Adjust any samples on lights, defaults to 1, some may need up to 8 to get nice flawless clean shadow penumbras, or more. You adjust the samples on the lights them self.

After you are rid of noise in lights, you go to the render settings tab and set Camera AA to 2. then you start to increase the Samples for diffuse, until the noise disapears in the diffuse layer - you can render an AOV called indirect_diffuse, it will reveal any noise. You do the same thing with specular, also use an AOV called specular_diffuse and identify the amount of samples needed and adjust accordingly.

You can render interior images in fairly good quality within minutes if your settings are right.

You can use area lights instead of other light types, area lights are very fast and can simulate both skylight, direct light and sun lights, so that will further increase the speed but a few magnitudes.

[Anonymous]

Thanks @madsd. sounds like some great info. I do have a couple questions however.

1. what do you mean by low camera.

2. Do you prefer  a physical camera or free or target camera

3. Do you use only Arnold lights and materials?

4. Render settings tab do you mean render setup under Rendering?

Sorry for all the questions. Thank you!

[madsd]

---

@Anonymouswrote:

Thanks @madsd. sounds like some great info. I do have a couple questions however.

1. what do you mean by low camera.

2. Do you prefer  a physical camera or free or target camera

3. Do you use only Arnold lights and materials?

4. Render settings tab do you mean render setup under Rendering?

Sorry for all the questions. Thank you!

---

1. Camera AA in the Arnold render panel yes. Set to 2 as a start.

2. Target camera is a legacy item, the physical camera is more current with more features and intergrates great with Arnold.

3. Always use Arnold lights and materials, the lights have superior flexibility over standard lights, you have light filters, barn doors and a lot of other nice things, + the light samples only sits on the Arnold lights, and you want to calibrate those for noiseless images.

4. Yes.

[Anonymous]

Thank you!

I will start playing with it. Cant stay on Quicksilver for ever. lol

[madsd]

Also note, that Arnold ships with 2 denoisers now.

You can render noiseless interiors within seconds using only a skylight.

Here with the lowest and worst possible settings in the worst kind of scenario, comparing with and without.
The 100 frames took less than 2 minutes to render, it is clear the denoiser does a great job even at very low quality

[Anonymous]

great! thanks 

[madsd]

You can also use the high quality denoiser called noice.exe

For now you have to do a bit of Command prompt string command, but its quite easy.

Here are 2 simple examples.

First one rendered in a couple of seconds and the interior uses the most expensive light rig available in terms of being noise prone, took 2 minutes to render.

The difference is huge. not only does it remove shadow noise it also takes case of speculars.

[madsd]

Mesh lights + sky light , 8 minute render.

noice.exe default settings.

[Anonymous]

Good morning @madsd

Wow love seeing examples! They are great! Thank you so much for sharing and your input!

Now I need to balance time to learn. Kind of tricky between getting things done that are in process on time for learning a new render engine.

Thanks again!

[sdeters]

Is there a place that describes on how to use this noice.exe?  Maybe a Youtube Video example.

There is also the OPtix Denoiser 

I did find this.

https://docs.solidangle.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=71012562

[madsd]

Sure,

I already made a mp4 video showing all steps, thought about starting up doing some more youtube videos, but I guess something like this could just be shared here, for now.

Let me quickly edit a version you can check out.

[madsd · Accepted solution]

Here --> https://www.dropbox.com/s/3h2rf1fa85ez5y6/dddd.mp4?dl=0

[sdeters]

Thanks for the video.  It helped a lot. 

[Anonymous]

I hope that noice will be integrated in the graphical interface instead being a command line thing. It doesn't seem something practical to do when doing single frames tests.

[madsd]

Ye,

I am working on some script and UI.

It can also just go into post script slot and be automated after a frame ends.

Ill keep you guys notified when I get a version going or someone else does it first, it should not be too complicated.

We already have a phyton script semi working, so should not worry too much.

[madsd]

Worked a bit on the tool that automaticly denoises image sequences.

This sequence is lit by a skylight, each frame took 20 seconds to render.
Included before/after in the sequence.

[madsd]

Karl,

This is a start, you can save it out as a .bat file and double click.
But you need to change the MPath and MName  obviously and the "100" is the number of frames in the sequence.

It should start a batch process up converting all frames to denoised versions in same folder.

It works perfect here, let me know if it works on your side.

@Anonymous off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
SET "noice=C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\ApplicationPlugins\MAXtoA\noice.exe"
SET "MPath=C:\go\"
SET "MName=go"
for /l %%i in (1,1,100) do (
set "frame=%%i"

if !frame! GEQ 100 set "lframe=0!frame!"
if !frame! LEQ 99 set "lframe=00!frame!"
if !frame! LEQ 9 set "lframe=000!frame!"

start /WAIT %noice% -i %MPath%%MName%_AOVs!lframe!.exr -o %MPath%%MName%_Denoised!lframe!.exr
)

[Anonymous]

It looks great for that speed! I will take a look.

[Anonymous]

How much work would you think it would take to convert this to Arnold and get more realistic results?

This was doing with Quicksilver still