Final Render looks worse than while rendering

[AlmostAussie]

Blender adds some strange post-processing to the image after the render samples finish, what is going on?

• Not using any denoising
• Not using anything in Compositor

yet once the render finishes, the most obvious is the jacket texture that becomes wavy (jacket textured in Substance Painter 3D), also if you zoom in close & compare, the Finished image is overall slightly more grainy and adds more pronounced fireflies than the image that is in the rendering process…

Anyone knows what blender does after it finishes rendering the samples that makes it look worse? T.T

Thanks.

• it almost seems like Cycles exaggerates the Normal data while finalizing the image?

[cjgladback]

I know you say if you zoom in it looks more firefly-ful but that finished screenshot you have seems to have the same kind of moire effect that I witness as just an issue with the blender viewer when anything other than exactly 100% zoom–does it still have issues when you save out the file and look at it in another image viewer?

[AlmostAussie]

yep, the fireflies are less noticeable, but the jacket texture is significantly different no matter where I view it.

[DNorman]

Have you tried turning off denoiseing? I am not a fan of it unless totally necessary. Also clamping but I think that is progressive and is not done in “finalize”

[cjgladback]

Okay! So I’ve learned a thing. The function that automatically filters a render is the Pixel Filter under the Film settings:

The moire effect has come up before:

How to avoid Moire (wave-like noise)

[2020y02m28d_162430754] I am facing a render issue of “Moire” (wave-like noise) Left shows Moire, Right shows no Moire because of big scale of one tile. My current setting is like this: Renderer : Cycles Resolution : 1000px Pixel Filter : Blackman 0.50 px Lighting : Default All I know about Moire is, I can decrease it by having larger value in Pixel Filter(like 2.00) However, I don’t want to make a whole render result blurry. I just want to blur the tiling map ( I use 3dsMax, and it h…

And solutions might just be to render a larger image to scale down afterward.

More technical info about the pixel filter as it was several years ago (that I’ll be honest I don’t entirely understand other than yes, it’s a useful thing for every render) can be found here at least:

What's the relation between Cycles' sampling pattern and the pixel filter?

[DNorman]

So that is another one to look out for!

[cjgladback]

To solidify the learning for myself, I tested it out with one of my more sharply normaled fabrics. So I don’t regret using the default 1.5px width filter for this character, but if you continue to have issues you could increase the width of the filter and if that makes other textures too soft, you could potentially comp together the wider filter on your fabric over the more general-use filtered rest of the shot. (As far as I can tell, the filter is baked into the render though, so that’s two separate renders needed for each shot.)

[AlmostAussie]

Incredible find, thank you so much!