Denoiser testers wanted

[vlado]

So... this happens to be a hot topic lately and we could not let it pass by; the next service pack of V-Ray will include a denoising tool and I need some volunteers to check what we have so far and give me some feedback before we go ahead and integrate it into V-Ray itself.

This is still a proof of concept, so it's not very user friendly, but should be workable. You will have to install a new version of V-Ray because the denoiser requires a render element that we did not have so far (the noise level for the pixels in the image, as computed by the image sampler). I only have builds for Max 2014-2016.

If you are interested, please email me at vlado@chaosgroup.com

Best regards,
Vlado

[khoross]

first test with vdenoiser
its mostly a direct lit scene BF/LC noise threshold 0.01 AA 42 with noise in refracted and shaded areas
attached original rendering / mild mode/ elements mode radius=3 threshold=0.002 noiselevel=0.3

it's a real timesaver with a noise threshold that high it cleaned up very well,
increasing the noise threshold just to clean up small shaded areas would have taken double the rendering time.

[eyepiz]

Nice does it work on animations?

Vlado, I sent you an email.

[vlado]

I have some animations in my Google drive folder that I posted earlier:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?...2s&usp=sharing

though these were done with a somewhat older version.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

first test with vdenoiser

Seems to have kept the grass quite well while reducing the noise through the glass and in the shadows.

Best regards,
Vlado

[khoross]

yeah i was quite surprise that the grass was kept well,
but the tree in the reflection was better in when i used the elements mode.
i think i will be using the element mode all the time i have more control and better results.
this quite a good denoiser for an alpha.
great work

[vlado]

Yeah, I was wondering which mode to leave on by default. Per-element denoising definitely keeps details better for archviz type images, but is somewhat slower.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Art48]

I think speed can be disregarded generally speaking. I mean we're talking minutes aren't we? Do we have tests with some times already for bigger images (6k+)? In my opinion for full size images everything under an hour is acceptable.

[khoross]

i did test a 5K image with elements denoising it took 43.84 sec on a double processor xeon E5-2620 v3 @2.4ghz, the vrimg file was 1.20gb.
i took at least 10 sec to load the file.

[Art48]

That's blazing. Although your images propably are sampled good already, right? For preview purposes I mostly use around 0.03 - 0.07. It would be interesting to see how it behaves with those values, since especially 0.03 is a good value generally for a fast rendering, not toooo noisy image as compared to the cleanliness of a 0.01 or 0.005 image for final quality.

[vlado]

It would be interesting to see how it behaves with those values, since especially 0.03 is a good value generally for a fast rendering, not toooo noisy image as compared to the cleanliness of a 0.01 or 0.005 image for final quality.

I've found that 0.02-0.03 generally works well; 0.04-0.05 begins to stretch things too far a little bit and the result are not as good. But why don't you get the denoiser and find out

Best regards,
Vlado

[Art48]

Thanks for that info. Thing is I can't install it here, we're in production ^^.

[Moriah]

Does it really need to have a vrimg rendered? We usually either output to several EXR's or TGA's...

[pingus]

First tests here on furry animated characters.

Denoiser is returning very soft fur. Acceptables values i found are very low : -mode=mild -radius=0.7 -noiseLevelMultiplier=0.25
Maybe a blending between frames higher than 1 would help ?

A question i'm asking : do i need to render original with many noise (like Altuse Denoiser advice) or should i try to render with productions settings and the denoise will clean the residual noise ?

BTW the denoise process is really fast & worth it ! (~30s on 50Mo vrimg)

-p-

[vlado]

Denoiser is returning very soft fur.

Is that good or bad? I know some people have been begging for soft fur... Do you have any images that you can show?

Maybe a blending between frames higher than 1 would help?

Not much in terms of softness, but you can try to denoise per elements (as opposed to single pass).

A question i'm asking : do i need to render original with many noise (like Altuse Denoiser advice) or should i try to render with productions settings and the denoise will clean the residual noise?

The intent of our denoiser is primarily to help clean up residual noise in images that are already decently sampled. You could use settings that are slightly lower quality than your usual production settings (f.e. if you use noise threshold 0.01, you could use 0.02 and denoise afterwards).

Best regards,
Vlado