Arnold denoise only with CPU rendering, NOT with GPU rendering, correct?

[Anonymous]

A few questions for anyone who is has a few seconds.

To confirm...the Arnold Denoiser ONLY works with CPU rendering, not GPU, correct?

Next, is there any simple way to denoise individual AOV's, like diffuse, SSS, etc?

I see the 'denoise' checkbox beside each AOV within the AOV manager dialog, but when I check them on my AOV's, the render comes out black. so something's not working.

When I use the Arnold denoiser, (input and output, in my render settings) my workflow is to USE MY CPU FOR RENDERING, then check the 'output denoising AOV's', then render, then input the EXR's with the denoising AOV's, then denoise and it works. But I'm left with only my beauty pass. Is there any way to also denoise individual AOV's?

BTW, I'm using Max 2020.

[Stephen.Blair]

Arnold Denoiser is not supported by Arnold GPU yet.

Arnold GPU doesn't support variance filters yet, and the Arnold Denoiser needs AOVs that user variacne filters.

[Stephen.Blair]

You can denoise AOVs, but you have to do with the command-line version of the Arnold Denoiser (noice.exe). And there's extra steps in 3d Max to get the required variance AOVs.

[Anonymous]

Makes sense. Not with GPU, only CPU. thanks.

Not to be a pain, but do you know of any tutorial/how-to for using noice.exe to denoise AOV components, via my command line?

On another note, one solution I've found is to render GPU, and use the Optix denoiser per AOV component. (little 'denoise' checkbos in my OAV manager)

I find that if I start with a pretty clean image, Optix does very little damage. For example, I'm rendering with my GPU, Adaptive sampling ON, max samples set to 16, and my adaptive threshold set to 0.001. This gives me a pretty good start, and denoising my components does very little damage and looks pretty good. Optix really destroys the image if it was a really noisy image to start with.

One issue though is I can't seem to render several denoised components inside one AOV sequence. It has to be only one denoised component per AOV, or it doesn't render. Is this right? Should I be able to do this?

[Stephen.Blair]

How to denoise AOVs with noice (aka the Arnold Denoiser)

https://arnoldsupport.com/2020/09/21/maxtoa-denoising-aovs-with-noice/