This was rendered with 2000 Samples, zero clamping, no caustics unchecked, min. bounces 128 and max. bounces 128. I’m not sure what would give me the best results while retaining the quality, I’ve never worked with a scene with so much spec before.
I guess I need to crank up Indirect Clamping, but before I wait another hour for it to render, I’d rather ask someone more experienced than me what I could change Oh and please use the zoom, in full res the noise is quite eye-catching.
I used an area lamp placed directly over the sword, to show the specular highlights on the blade. I also tried out mesh lights but they didn’t give me the same results.
Hey there
Here is a link to the blender wiki. It explains where noise is coming from and how to reduce it:
It goes away when I increase the roughness of the glossy to .2, but that is not really what I want, because then the highlights are too soft. Any suggestions? Sorry if the solution is really apparent, I’m a noob when it comes to shading/rendering
Hey, i just played with a displaced cube (according to your 2nd pic the sword handle looks displaced) and a similar node setup as you, and i increased both clamping values to 2. I also used an arealight straight above the cube, with default settings. with 50 samples i get no noticable noise on the displaced surface… but looking again to your first pic, you dont have displacements on the sword handle ? I am not soo good at rendering as well, but i can quickly test atleast (with GPU)… so hope this helps a bit…
Seems it was all about the direct clamping <.< It darkens the image quite a bit, but at least the noise goes away. I read a tutorial which suggested not to touch this value and rather work with indirect clamping as of 2.70 but seems he was wrong. At least for my specific case.
Thank you very much for making the effort of reconstructing the problem!
By the way, it would be interesting to see your result after you turned off clamping. The problem with this is that the image just gets way too dark, and I don’t get that ‘shiny’ gold which I have in my first picture. I’m not exactly sure why your image is still so bright, maybe its because of the displacement and thus the light bouncing around. I am actually not using displacement for my handle, it’s just hardsurface modelled.
I’m currently trying to render in very low resolution but with 5000 samples, to see if the noise actually clears when I’m using higher sampling values. I think that the noise is actually just a highlight, but the samples were too low… Still, rendering a full HD picture at 5000 samples will be a paaaaaain. I can’t even use GPU because I have a AMD card…
Really, this is the first time I’m having such a problem with noise in Blender <.<
Still not quite there, but I think you can see where it’s going. But there simply has to be a better way, I can’t afford to render this with 5k+ samples in full resolution
This… is brilliant <.< Thank you so much you really saved my night now Gold looks kind of dark, but I guess I can easily fix this by increasing the brightness of the lamp or making the gold brighter.
I guess I should have posted the .blend file earlier and saved you some time ._.
Oh and please use the zoom, in full res the noise is quite eye-catching.
