Hi:
I use blender for my work, make design and renders of furniture, home interiors, office… …
I render with cycles, but some scenes, are really hard to optimize and correct lighting, and often, always get noise (inclusive with 3k samples).
Never tryied other software (well, a little sketchup).
software as maya, modo… or renders as indigo, mentalray, luxrender… are better or well, more efficient for interior and furniture? what is your experience?
It is true that Cycles needs a lot of samples to properly render an interior, but 2.79 will contain a new feature that will help.
The denoising project described in this thread will allow you to render an interior scene with only half or even just a third of the samples that would otherwise be needed (and even then, the speed increase is reported to go up to 10X for scenes that are easier to light and don’t have a lot of tiny details).
i was testitng a little denoise button, in some materials look good, but for example, plain materials as ceiling, in my case, make it as watercolour, really bad result
Hi, do you have a small example .blend?
It is may a bug and only a few weeks to fix until 2.79.
Cheers, mib
Top image without, other with denoising button, some parts lost all details and rarely colour… still doing test, but i’m interested in your experience with other software/render if is easiest or quickly ger photorealism
Increase samples (recommended)
or increase denoiser’s radius (this will cause loss of details tho).
Denoising algorithms are not magic bullets, they have plenty of weaknesses, and they simply can’t perform better than a clean original render. IMO, having a slight amount of noise in the final image is way less distracting than the blotchy look you often get with denoising.
For interior renders, you really should consider looking at an external renderer, or cheating a lot. I like cycles’ tight integration with blender, so I find ways to cheat. I drop the number of bounces to reduce noise, crank up the AO to fill in dark areas, and add a bunch of fill lights as necessary. I encourage experimenting with branched path tracing while using as many lamp objects, and as few emissive objects as possible.
Are you using experimental kernel? Curious as the denoiser passes can only be activated in the renderlayer if it’s used (not available in supported), perhaps they are not rendered and used (unless experimental is used, I know for sure you do not need to keep the renderlayer) otherwise? I often get good results with default values in the denoiser tab.
the cheapest trick i know is rendering crazy massive, then apply a small 2 pixel blur, then scale down to a reasonable size. i can get away with as low as 100 branched samples on a good day 
also, as said, lamp objects are greatly more efficient then emission shaders.
sometimes lamp multiple importance makes noise worse.
turning off caustics is not an option for interior architecture renders, mainly due to vast amount of light it helps bounce around.
Render with enough samples and the final result won’t have any blotches, but it is correct that with pathtracing at least, there is no huge shortcut to awesome looking interior renders (despite Cycles getting faster in each subsequent release).
i’m looking renders in artstation (they are great artist in the world :-)), and i’m looking really more level and better work with maya and vray vs other sofware
Arch interiors are very rarely done with brute forced path tracing. Most use some form of biased GI, like final gather or irradiance caching. These are not available in Cycles, because its goal has never been to be an architectural renderer, but rather a production character animation renderer. Seek out something like Thea or V-Ray if you’re set on doing arch interiors, but be aware that the set up time to get clean interiors is almost as much of a pain a simply waiting for longer brute force renders.
This is nowhere 3000 samples. Try 2000 with denoise and it will be clean as a whistle.
yes, i like interiors, but believe photorealism is more a art than a thecniche… …
looked thearender and interiors are not so good in their gallery, looks “toy render”,
vray gallery is incredible (don’t know if is for better software, or is because vray have more users with good skills)
tomorrow try it. i promise, today i’m learning a lot of lightment setups (and noise setup je je
Do you have clamping turned off? One thing you could do is add another area light on the inside of those blinds.
When you light the scene through a window, you should probably try out light portals. They tell the path tracing that there is light coming from that direction and thus reduce the noise. Clamping might help too, but you might loose some lighting details.
ok, believe there s not a perfect solution for interiors with cycles
Kinda harsh thing to say because there are many examples where it looks great with cycles.
Bigbad, just because there are some good examples doesn’t mean it is perfect.
