How to render an image in the middle of being 'denoised'

[Marcus_Johnston]

So this might be a bit of a weird ask, but I wondered if there was a way of ‘pausing’ and rendering out a scene halfway through it being denoised. i.e. within cycles while rendering out in the viewport, you will see the denoiser gradually sharpen the image.

I love the effect it has and was wondering if there was any way better than hacking an ugly screenshot of it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[koko_ze (Anže Orehek)]

This artifact happens when the denoiser doesn’t have enough information (samples) to create a clean image.

So if you want to have this artifact in your final render just set the sample count really low for rendering.

[Marcus_Johnston]

I thought it was along those lines before but could never get a similar result. Turned out the denoiser in the viewport was different from the render denoiser so just switching to Optix solved this instead, Thank you very much for the help!

Can achieve some lovely painterly effects now.