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Hi,

recently took advantage of the Black Friday deal to finally upgrade to v4!

I'm having fun with it and absolutely love the denoiser! I can render at much, much lower sl's and still get the same results.

I did a little low res test render for a client the other day and at low res;
- the normal render took 25 mins
- the denoised render took 6 mins!!
however, the denoising then took an additional 3 mins on top of this!

Is there any way to estimate the time the denoiser needs?

I did the same thing. Unfortunately, the kind of scenes I tend to make take a long time to clear (for a full size render, which for me is a 6K image, It usually takes 10 days) and the denoiser doesn't seem to be helping me all that much. I find the extra sampling function to be more effective, but maybe I haven't played with it too much.

My question for you is: Do you find using the denoiser softens/blurs your final image? If no, what level do you normally sample to and what are sampleing to with the denoiser?

My renders aren't 6K!!

However, I usually find that I can drop the denoising version's sample level considerably and still get great results. I'm working on shiny metallic products at the moment and find I can drop the sl by about a third i.e. if you're currently waiting until sl18 to clear, you should be fine with sl12 (or even sl10!) with the denoising process.

If you're curently waiting 6 days (!!!), I'd definitely give it a go (although you'll just have to wait for the denoising process - there's no progress bar!). Try it with some 2k versions as tests and compare the timings.

There is no blurring or softening of the image, just less (or no!) noise - it's great!

(although if you're really waiting for 6 days, I'd highly recommend using Ranch Render. I use them for all my animations and they render about 20x faster than my PC!)

There's a current bug in the denoiser which makes the initial denoising blurry, but an easy workaround is to simply press the "Re-denoise" button again and the second denoising should work properly. I'm not sure if this always happens but for me it's the case.

I'd still like to have some controls though of the denoising process like the Altus standalone lets you do (the denoising tech in V4).

It shouldn't take 3 minutes for a low rez denoising, maybe it depends on the graphics card? A newer Geforce should do it a lot faster.

Great to hear from you again Mihai!

Thanks for the heads-up about the initial blurriness but I haven't noticed this myself (although my images are relatively low res; 2k and under).

Hello to all,
I am attaching a Denoiser proof.
In my opinion it is not applicable when there are textures.
In my case, not so much for the floor, very fine texture,
but I thought that in the wood grain it could maintain definition.

Apllicable only to smooth materials without textures?
Or am I wrong with something?

Andrea, I have had similar result as you when rendering low resolution draft images, especially with wood grain, internally. The denoised result that you show certainly looks similar to those I have had due to the denoiser bug that Mihai pointed out. Re-denoising makes a huge difference, but can still be a problem at lower resolutions.

The other thing to try in your image editor of choice, is to add the denoised image over the top of your original merged rendering with, say a 50-75% opacity and normal blending mode. I have had great results with a very noisy rendered internal draft image (1200x800 SL13.70) using this technique, as the original details are brought back in.

I reopened the MXI scene.
I think I can type "Re-Denoise"
Instead it is not active. As if the render had not set the Denoiser ...

So "Re-Denoise" is active only during rendering?

Yes, I think that is a limitation in the current version of Maxwell. However, there is a command line procedure to get a denoised image from a previously denoised render. The Maxwell v4 documentation states:

mximerge -folder:"folder containing the mxi files of the same frame" -coopdenoiser:"output path and name of the denoised image" -target:"path of the merged mxi file"

http://support.nextlimit.com/display/maxwell4/Denoiser

I suggest reading the whole page as it is quite informative. I had trouble when trying to denoise a 4500x3000 pixel image on my GPU (a 6GB Titan Black). I couldn't get it to work in the end as the GPU/CPU option it seems is hard coded into the mxi files, but it did go through the denoising process. There is a thread on here about that somewhere...

Andrea Silvi wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 26, 2018 11:06 am

Hello to all,
I am attaching a Denoiser proof.
In my opinion it is not applicable when there are textures.
In my case, not so much for the floor, very fine texture,
but I thought that in the wood grain it could maintain definition.

Apllicable only to smooth materials without textures?
Or am I wrong with something?

It should definitely not be that bad, yes it does look like that bug with the first denoising smudging everything. The denoiser works by rendering twice to the SL that you specify and then it compares noise patterns and uses other tricks to determine what is noise and what isn't. These two MXI files of your render are in your computers temp folder. But if they aren't there anymore, you can't run the denoiser again, you have to re-render.