I’ve been testing using a median blend mode to see if I can do lower sample renders and combine them using median operator into an image which would have less noise. I tried initially to see if I could do this in Blender itself but its going to be a fairly complex task I think. ImageMagick however can do this.
I rendered 10 images at 100 samples each but with a different random seed for each ( used the anim render to do this).
The process compares favourably to the result if I had rendered at 10 * 100 samples. Its a little noisier BUT the advantage of this approach may be that because the lower images are rendered using teh anim then the process can easily be stopped and restarted any number of times to produce an arbitrary number of lower sampled images without tying up my computer for one high sample image.
this will only work for static images though I think. Ill test it ater on something animated.
The difference doesnt look as marked on these posted images as it does when I look at the files on PC. I may do 20 renders at 5 samples t0 show the noise in the original images better or use a noisier image setup.
Ok - the last one didnt show the difference really. I thiink I may have accidentally posted a 100 sample render for the first image rather than a ten sample one.
So … here is one of twenty 10 sample renders
From my brief experiments today ( and thinking about the maths involved) I have concluded that this technique will work best the more renders are used. So its likely to be better to use 5* 20 sample renders rather than 4 * 25 render sample renders. Ive still to test this though and I havent done any timings on total process time start to finish. However thats not really the point of this for me. The process means I could do short renders whenever convenient then combine them later to produce in effect a higher sample render
Ive been doing some work trying to create a fully procedural sun with cycles nodes.
The aim was to make it highly controllable with a bright disc, corona with noise, sizeable down t the tiniest spot and with controllable lighting strength and something that could be integrated with the sky nodes. Well Ive cracked it.
In this image Ive made the sun fairly big. Fov of the camera is 50deg. Ive put an environment texture of clouds that I rendered when testing my cloud nodes mixed with the procedural sun/sky. Ill post renders of what the sun can do on its own later perhaps.
There is no post processing at all on this image and it was rendered with 10 samples.
Update: Here is the sun itself without the sky texture mixed in. THis sun is procedural and casts good light. I can change the size easily from a huge disc to a tiny spot and the corona , corana noise, corona size and color temp of the light and sun intensity are all controllable from the node group.
I was working on a landscape and slapped some materials on it and a wee boat to give a sense of scale. I need to give the textures more definition. I might shove this up as a WIP at some point.
The last one was a interesting accident. What im doing is trying to do a version of the famous Japanese series of paintings. I have a particular one as reference. Im not trying for a replica its more something to inspire me but im using a similar form. Still an awful lot to do. This is a quick test with some translucency and some compositing.
First Video upload here. This is from Google because Vimeo doesnt seem to be working in my browser anymore!
This is a quick fireworks test. It rendered very fast and gave me acceptable results. No post processing. Total render time around 10 mins.
I just realised I allowed Youtube to do some adjustments to that video. This was the video as originally uploaded.
Im going to put a priestess with a glowing druid stick on the platform at the left so that the orb is against the dark shadowed area. Shell be quite small as I want the effect to be one of large scale.
The texture was a result of running a picture through a neural network. I then processed the texture with Crazybump and used the resulting textures on a displaced plane. The lighting is quite flat so it doesn’t really show that but I decided I quite liked it with the flat lighting anyway.
