Hi,
I’m currently looking at the Denoisers included with Redshift (OptiX and Altus Innobright) - obviously they can save you a lot of render time and tweaking.
Which denoisers do people recommend and do you recommend using them? Obviously you’re going to get a slight compromise with blurring…
Nick
Some of the guys here use the Optix denoiser, but I havent tried myself so can;t really speak to the pros and cons… I actually prefer to do my denoising in post using Neat Video denoiser. It gives you a lot of control. I would say 75% of the time it cleans things up perfectly.
FYI–there are already some good threads here about this subject–but not sure how good the searchablity function on this forum is these days to find them.
HI Joel / JoelDubin- thanks again for your feedback I’ll take a look. Yeh I use After Effects natively now and then for subtle denoising - but it’s nice if u see it straight into the render so you can see what u can get away with …
I’ve had goes with OptiX and Altus with a single pass - Altus seems better but again they seem to be charging for it - unsurprisedly. Maddening
I don’t know if it could be a solution for animations but the V3. automatic sampling works surprising well and I haven’t needed denoising since using it.
Altus was a paid product in the past. It is now included for free in Redshift on the 3.0 branch.
I watched a really interesting video on noise reduction by Chad Ashley from Greyscale Gorilla and his take was for animation at least Neat Video is a fantastic option. I use Pro Render and it’s Denoiser and I find it smooths out details too much. So I vote for Neat Video for animation. Video is here:
Another vote for Neat Video here. Tried all the built in denoisers and Neat does the best job, in our opinion, not to mention faster and more flexible being it’s a post option.
Yeh Altus Innobright is included with Redshift bundled with Cinema 4D - Maxon got back to me today and told me this. When I rendered with their denoiser I got a watermark that’s why I mentioned it.
Neat Video should be in everybody’s toolkit, it’s beauty is that it copes with such a broad range of noise types. These so-called AI denoisers are basically tuned for monte-carlo based noise and anything that deviates too far from what the denoiser expects can be left unusable after denoising.
Having used the Optix and Intel denoisers I’d say the Intel denoiser has given me much more acceptable results.
The Intel denoiser works best when the image has a uniform fine grain noise texture across it which you get with renderers like ProRender and Cycles. Redshift, because of the way it works, can have uneven noise across the image which seems to fool the denoisers, at lest that’s my experience.
Resolve Studio also has some great temporal deflickering tools which can iron out the odd denoiser induced artefact. I highly recommend Resolve Studio as a Swiss Army knife for content delivery.
we have a little plugin for using the INTEL denoiser in c4d 18-21, also with RS (use bruteforce in that case and no filtering).
it works very well denoising fine but very visible noise, to no noise and also blending it with original for tuning to let some rest noise stay.
the advantage is you can denoise also images or series of images from disc after rendering,
so this works non destructive and is an easy tunable denoising result in post at a low price.
it is winows only for now, it might interest some RS users.
i use it often for my projects with various render engines, due the easy workflow, it denoises direct in the c4d picture viewer, so i not have to leave c4d (also if image sloaded from disc are used)
you find it here for only 29.- euro, permanent life time lic:
cheers
Stefan
One other thing to note: I believe the next update to Redshift - due very soon - will support the latest version of Optix - v7. I understand that includes improvements to the denoiser.
Having ditched Adobe CS, I now use Apple Motion, and after awful results with Red Giant Denoiser, I’ve switched to RE:Vision Denoise, which seems to work really well. Relatively simple controls and can be tweaked easily. It denoised a scene from Terragen 4 and removed some flicker as an unexpeteded bonus.
I use OctaneX and its denoiser is very good – when it works, which it currently doesn’t – so a post denoiser is useful for things like volumes which need long render times
