Noise, noise, noise! (Patreon)

Hey folks! I'm so sorry about the radio silence on my end. But as per usual, radio silence means I'm over here ripping my hair out, trying to figure out a solution to a stupid problem.

In this case, the problem is noise:

Basically, 3D rendering works a lot like a camera. The less light hits an object, the more grainy noise you get. Except in 3D, the issue is compounded. It's not always about the amount of light, but also where the light is coming from. So if the sun is shining into a room, the render will still be noisy because unlike real life, where you have probably trillions of photons, ray-traced renderer will send out far fewer.

To solve this issue, there exist tools called "denoisers". They take that random, ugly noise and smooth it out, leaving just the details (like sharp lines) intact. Trouble is, even to the AI-based denoisers, fur and hair both just look like noise. Because when fur moves, the light glints just a bit differently off it in each frame. So the denoiser thinks, "This object changes so drastically between frames, it has to be noise!"

Sooo that's where I'm at. Indoor scene, lit by sunlight = super noisy. Denoiser smoothed out all the fur and made everything worse. I wouldn't even mind the smoothness, but it smooths things out a bit differently each frame, so you still get noise, but it's just large and splotchy instead of grainy.

So I'm trying to figure out a solution.

The "easy" solution is to add more "samples" or basically rays of light. The more samples you add, the less noise. But more samples also means WAY longer render times. What's normally a 2-3 min/frame render becomes a 30 min/frame render. So 1,000 frames goes from taking 2 days to taking almost a month!

Anyway, here's a quick WIP snippet with the noise, while I figure out the best way to denoise this (yes I also redid most of the scene last week because I was unhappy with it. New bathrobe, altered lighting, new bathroom wall texture). 

There are a few new tricks I'm gonna try tonight. Hopefully one of them lands a result that both looks good and doesn't make a 40 sec long animation take a whole month to render out. I've been trying to create more story-driven content (this being the first piece in that series!) so I really need to be able to render longer animations in a decent enough timeframe.

Good news is once I have a method, this problem shouldn't come up in the future.

Thank you all for your patience and support!