Does anyone have some ideas on how I can minimize this noise when using Glass materials in Cycles Render? I’m rendering with a sample of 800 and have tried adjusting some of the noise reduction options under the Render Layers tab, but this is the result… not good.
Are you using an area light or a mesh light?
An area light will render better than a mesh light.
I assume you played with “filter glossy”,“clamp direct” and “clamp indirect”, and that disabling “reflective caustics” and "refractive caustics is not an option
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Yeah filter glossy at 0.5 might help a lot with that.
Could also try changing your sampling type from Path Tracing to Branched Path Tracing, with the Final preset, for a little extra help.
If you’re aiming for nice caustics, you should be aware that Cycles is in no way equipped to render those cleanly and efficiently. It will need an ungodly amount of samples and still be noisy as hell (see here for an example).
For advanced lighting effects like that you will need to use another render engine. Or use fake caustics. Period.
Thanks everyone! I did see some improvement with the clamping but the caustics largely went away. Still, I was only toying around, though I’ve seem some impressive attempts - not sure what they are doing that I am not (i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-_bwF_yexw).
That animation was rendered in yafaray, which is a renderer that can handle caustics much better.