i started using cycles and i was trying to figure out why my render look grainy. how can i get rid of that grainy look?
Short answer: increase the samples for preview and render. Try 50, then 100, 300, 1000… Every scene is different.
the more samples the less grains?
Also, there are a number of other factors that can affect the graininess, such as the amount of reflective, glassy, and glossy surfaces, the size of the image, etc.
Increasing the sample size will help with the noise. If you have a large scene, though, you may find you have a lot of noise until you’re hitting 1000 or 2000 samples. On Blender Cookie, Bartek Skorupa did some tutorials on reducing noise in post by breaking the image into the separate pass layers and recombining them. Separating the passes allows you to focus the post work on the passes that are noisy without affecting the ones that aren’t. I did an image recently that I rendered to 500 samples that was still fairly noisy, but just doing the methods Bartek showed, I was able to get a fairly decent looking image that was better than when I had done the same image to a slightly smaller size and 1000 samples.
Thanks a lot guys. I got so many questions about cycles its so confusing.
Also check out these tips by Blender Guru (thanks Andrew Price!!!):
http://www.blenderguru.com/4-easy-ways-to-speed-up-cycles/
Helped me a lot.
Besides tips concerning speed, the appended comments discuss grain issues…