Interior Noise / High Light Samples

[mckenzie2VER2]

Hey All,

I've been practicing on my interior arc viz scenes and I'm having a hard time getting rid of noise. I've read all of the available documentation/tutorials but I'm still not winning.

For example, if I have just a physical sky beaming into a room, 50 samples on the sky won't remove direct diffuse noise. 

In many cases 10 diffuse samples for diffuse indirect even with high AA samples won't clear GI noise. 

I've tried quad light and distant light combos as well as just physical etc. A quad light inside the room seems to work pretty well but then I don't get the correct lighting on the windows or ceiling. 

If someone who does arc viz could give me pointers on how they typically light scenes that would be helpful.

[thiago.ize]

Try portal lights. Ideally with portal lights you'd set them to just interior mode as that is even better than interior/exterior mode.

I also recommend keeping your non-AA samples low (maybe 3 or 4 at most) and let adaptive AA do the bulk of the work.

[mckenzie2VER2]

Thanks for the response.

I found a solution in and old Arnold forum post - and that was to use the light decay filter. I think what was happening was the rays were dying before they could reach the far wall of the building, so there wasn't that much GI bounce, and what was there was super noisy. If I cranked the light exposure objects near the lights would obviously blow out. The light decay filter fixed all of those issues which allowed me to reduced the light samples to more reasonably levels along with sample settings.

I've tried the adaptive sampling a few times but it just seems to take an absolute age to do anything, hasn't decreased render times in my case. Maybe I'm doing it wrong!