To the guy wearing the fedora hat who is going to reply: " It depends on the scene"
Yes, I know that, I think we all know that, go away, nobody asked for your obvious opinion.
To other who used Blender in animation projects, what is the minimum samples you have gotten away with when using the denoiser ? A number please ;-p
From my own experience, I feel that 300 is about the lowest I can go before the denoiser craps out, what has been your experience regarding this matter during animation productions ?
The lowest minimum I could get away with a denoiser is something around 32 samples. But that was on a scene where there was only an HDRi and a character.
On an indoor scene with quite a lot of reflections, I could get away with about 100 samples and denoising.
Though I usually use these levels of sampling for preview renders. I would up them to somewhere around 128 samples for the only HDRi and character scene and at least 512 samples for indoor scenes.
Yes, I also feel from experimentations that 500 samples is about there where de-noiser/render time ball park plays/balanced out nicely.
If I were to render BEYOND 500 samples I will always turn the de-noiser OFF, by that time the noise is almost a feature [film grain] more than anything.
But samples of 300 or less is sent STRAIGHT to the de-noiser.
You indicated that 128 samples is de-noiser friendly, I will try to see if I can get away with 128 samples thank you !
You might need more for animation than for stills, but I don’t have enough experience with rendering animations, which is the reason I couldn’t give any actual numbers. For still images you can often get acceptable results with <100 samples (32 or 64 say, 16 usually shows too many artifacts in Cycles denoise IMHO).
Note that there are a few other denoisers out there which tend to be optimal around more or fewer samples depending on their design, and it’s possible that one of them might give better results for your application (though the Cycles denoise is pretty good!). The Nvidia Optix denoiser is available for Blender through a couple add-ons I believe, and the new Intel denoiser may be as well.
First of all, this animation is SUCH an eye opener, it really makes me understand how forgiving our eyes are when things are in motion, but to be fair, my own experience differs only in the sense that my renders are mostly dark scenes where the noise are really screaming at your face as oppose to the bright happy and forgiving scene here.
Still really REALLY helpful reply to me and EVERYONE watching this ! Visual and numbers !!!
Now on to the question, you mentioned “12 square spp (144spp)”, is it 12 samples or 144 ? There are two slots we enter samples in 2.79b, a sample for preview and a sample for final render, your answer is confusing
12² = 144 spp. Square samples is an option, you can either do the computation yourself, or just give the number like in anti aliasing (8x msaa is actually 8x8 = 64 samples per pixel).
Indeed, in animations, people can’t notice details. And actually, the image has much more details than what any video service today will let through with it’s compression. So giving more spp will have 0 effect on the video people will see at the end.
Whoa, that’s how you speak with people helping you. You don’t put your dollars on squares so indeed it makes no sens, but your samples when doing antialisasing are put on a square, thus, devs made an option and so it makes sens. But have fun finding other people helping you.
Funny you are accusing people of being jack-ass and wanting to sound smart when you take everyone here from very high, with a very harsh way of speaking. You write often bold for people you think are to dumb to understand you. I encourage you to judge yourself first.
16 is the bare minimum
