Vray Denoiser for Animations

[Jonathan Sanchez]

Hi all, it's been ages since I posted here. So my bread and butter has always been still images, but, I've been commissioned to create my first animated walkthrough of an exterior/interior of a home. I'm trying to sort out the latest and greatest work process for creating animations on vray 3.4. Few questions:

 

-What's the process for incorporating the Denoiser in Vray 3.4 for the animations?

 

-Should I still use IL + LC?.. or are we using brute now for animations?

[anandkumar2]

does denoiser works for an animation scene ?

iam trying it but i dont no what to do can one help me please

[Scott Schroeder]

Hi all, it's been ages since I posted here. So my bread and butter has always been still images, but, I've been commissioned to create my first animated walkthrough of an exterior/interior of a home. I'm trying to sort out the latest and greatest work process for creating animations on vray 3.4. Few questions:

 

-What's the process for incorporating the Denoiser in Vray 3.4 for the animations?

 

-Should I still use IL + LC?.. or are we using brute now for animations?

 

I used it recently for an animation and it worked really well. We were able to drop our render times down by almost half. I still used good ole LC+IR because the scene was originally set up that way and all of the lights were set to store with irradience. How you do your GI calc is up to you. While brute force has gotten huge speed improvements, sometimes you still can't beat the speed of a stored irradience map.

[anandkumar2]

Fine , iam happy to hear that but i dont no how to render it and apply denoiser to rgb sequence

[Scott Schroeder]

Fine , iam happy to hear that but i dont no how to render it and apply denoiser to rgb sequence

 

First you open a web browser. Then you go to a web search engine, I've heard that this new startup company called Google is doing great things with being able to search the internet. Then, you type in some keywords that you want to search for. Oh I don't know, let's just say for pure shits-n-giggles, try searching for Vray denoiser tutorial. Oh, look at that! Results! Congratulations!

 

[innerdream]

I like Scott.

[M V]

Is this new Google site better than Webcrawler?

[Jonathan Sanchez]

Thanks Scott, but to be fair, that video doesn't really show the process for animations. In fact, there is very little that i can find web-wide specificially on denoising animations.

 

My inquiry is mostly on how to incorporate the denoiser onto animation workflows. I've noticed that Vray has a standalone denoise tool, which they recommend using. Is this how you guys did it? Or did you just save the individual denoiser render element for each frame?

[Francisco Penaloza]

If you go to Chaos group website, on the V-Ray release page and updates will show you all new features of V-Ray and explain each button of the software. Also when you update V-Ray it come with some new release information where it explain how Denosier works.

It is a separated pass, not only one but several of them so you can comp later and adjust or combine as you need it.

[Scott Schroeder]

Thanks Scott, but to be fair, that video doesn't really show the process for animations. In fact, there is very little that i can find web-wide specificially on denoising animations.

 

My inquiry is mostly on how to incorporate the denoiser onto animation workflows. I've noticed that Vray has a standalone denoise tool, which they recommend using. Is this how you guys did it? Or did you just save the individual denoiser render element for each frame?

 

It is essentially the same process for stills and animations. Animations you may be able to denoise more since you won't be looking at a static shot.

 

Some pitfalls we ran into with it (can go for both stills and animations)

1. Lens effects do not work with denoiser, so you have to choose which one to use and which one to comp in later. Neither comp in really well to be honest.

2. Textures that have fine patterns like wood, can be reduced to solid colors as denoise may treat fine detail textures as noise. Relections/refractions can get a little goofy as well. Though generally not enough to really notice unless you are looking at them.

3. Don't be afraid to push their settings. I was able to push the "high" denoser settings much higher without any loss in detail from an animation standpoint.

4. I would stick with having the denoised result just saved as your diffuse pass. This thing can create many many render elements that can confuse your workflow. It's best to just let Vray do its thing and be done with it. Once you have some time to really dive into this, then you can play with saving out the separate render elements. This is compounded when you have 1,000s of animation frames. Still images are less likely to get overloaded with render elements.

5. You can use the standalone tool, though we didn't test it.

http://dabarti.com/vfx/using-v-ray-denoiser-tool-vdenoise-exe-with-send-to-scripts/

http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthread.php?88295-vDenoise-Command-Line-tool-Helper-(Maxscript-UI)

[Jonathan Sanchez]

I would stick with having the denoised result just saved as your diffuse pass

 

That's what I was thinking. Thank you sir.

[landrvr1]

One benefit of saving out as a separate pass is that you can comp that pass into AfterEffects. For instance, I had an outdoor scene in which the denoiser really worked great on some flat stone surfaces and moving plants. However, it tended to blur out details in the building glass. By comping that layer separately, I masked the lower portion of the frame that had the denoiser pass....

 

I keep hearing about this huge time savings, but so far I haven't experienced that at all... Might be my workflow/settings/whatever. I guess it allows you to use lower than normal quality settings with denoiser as the fixer? lol. Need to experiment more. Scott, any more insight into the workflow on that? What did you do differently than normal? Anything?

[Scott Schroeder]

I dropped my noise threshold from .01 to .03 and gained immense render time, essentialy I was able to get 2 frames done for every one frame without denoising it. It took some fiddling with the various denoiser settings but I was able to get an animation out with almost zero noticeable noise. This animation didn't have the need for anything other than medium to high-ish detail so I was okay with the denoiser taking out some of the ultra fine detail in textures/reflections. Other than that, everything else stayed the same.

 

If you still want an ultra crisp looking animation with loads of fine detail, then you start to hit the lower returns on render time and still be able to use denoiser. If you look at the examples, it is a lot of solid color surfaces rather than high detail textures.