Ridding myself of noisy reflections (3ds Max/Vray)

[nickcolavita]

I have tried to mess with the Sampling of my Materials/AA/Global DMC but can not find a way to get my glossy reflections to render smooth.

 

I am running Irradiance/Light Cache/ 1/16 AA Blackman for Filter Type. Color Threshold at .005

[nickcolavita]

The only way I found to fix the refl glossy noise issue was to bump the samples in the materials way up (to 128) I usually dont like going that high but hopefully doing it individually I wont take a massive render time hit.

 

Edit: I was having some noise trouble in the lights as well. When I added more lights to the scene.....upstairs....sun....exterior Tiki Torch lights...the noise multiplied exponentially. Changing the Filtering type helped a lot. I went from Blackman to Quadratic.

Edited December 2, 2014 by nickcolavita

[Chris MacDonald]

Agreed. If the noise is coming from the reflections, then increase the samples.

 

It doesn't help that you're using a sharpening filter (which I hate in general anyway) because this will only highlight areas of noise.

[Corey Beaulieu]

You can try rendering the reflection pass with a different render engine like Quicksilver or something or you can simply de-noise this pass before you apply it in post. The blue channel tends to be the noisiest.

 

This is, of course, a slight of hand method.

[nickcolavita]

Thanks a lot. Thats a good idea. Didnt think of just comping the reflection pass in post. I actually thing I got rid of a lot of the noise effectively. My glossy samples needed to be bumped to 128 on some materials.

 

Any idea why when I turn on more lights in my scene the rawlighting pass gets incrementally more noisy? I'm assuming its my light samples for those lights.

[alext2]

You could try to switch off "Probabilistic lights" in "Global switches"

[nickcolavita]

I read about that in a thread. Apparently that checkbox causes noise as well. I will try that too. Thanks.

 

The noise in the lighting is pretty clean, still have some in the reflections but its 10x's more readable now.

[alext2]

Did you read this tutorial?

May be it will help you to setup your scene.