I am wary about using ray-tracers because of the noisy result they produce. Is it possible to achieve 100% noise elimination in LuxRender? If not, when is something good enough? Just knowing the noise is there, even if I hardly see it, is annoying.
Theoretically, you can throw so many samples at the image that the noise level will go below a 16-bit float’s precision level. Of course, you’ll probably be dead before you get that render.
From a practical standpoint, by all means, if noise means that much to you go with PRMan style renderers.
Most renderers use stochastic methods somewhere (e.g. raytraced glossy reflections, shadows, final gather, etc), even PRMan. (In fact, Pixar’s latest movie is 100% physically-based raytracing).
Can you make out the noise?
Just knowing the noise is there, even if I hardly see it, is annoying.
I think the medical term for this is “obsessive compulsive disorder”.
While I like LuxRender, and am always happy to see someone else get to know it, I must question why is LuxRender your choice, if noise is such an issue.
There are specific use cases where you need something more advanced, and of course you can generate a noise free render with Lux, but there are probably faster render engines that generally will produce cleaner results quicker. Unless you plan on using SLGRender with an AMD GPU?
One of the issues for me with Luxrender is that when I last tested it on a scene, things came to a point where it seemed like the noise level just stopped decreasing all that much (it was still decreasing, but rather slowly).
This was using an interior scene with glass (which ironically is the type of thing that Lux’s metropolis sampling should excel at), what’s also ironic is that I started getting results that were more usable in Cycles with just plain pathtracing. (easier to clean up in post too, Luxrender’s noise makes things more difficult with its lower frequency and its 3x3 pixel fireflies).
Then again, later on I used Luxrender for a scene that Cycles had trouble with it and it became fairly clean, I’m sure the newer versions are better at this sort of thing than it used to be.
@Ace Dragon, Have you tried changing the filter settings? I changed mine to a Gaussian filter with 1x1 with 1.2 Alpha, that is alot closer to Cycles actually, and looks alot better IMO. The downside is you can get a little aliasing on lamp edges somethimes, but I do suggest you try it 