Clarisse Spotlight - Render Settings

[Music] hi there it's james miller for vfx nomad and here we're going to talk about render settings so i am dylan was mentioning in one of the comments that he was having a hard time uh tracking down any information about how to get better render settings or get rid of noise so i thought we would cover it here now i'm just going to wing this a little bit so the first thing that we're going to want to do is uh make sure that we're set to 100 on our resolution and we're going to try and pick some you know the bigger the better and we also want to have a starting point if we can so one of the things that i find very helpful when i'm doing things like this is called image history and i've been working on this for a while so i have a bunch of them already but yours will lightly be blank now the reason i'm doing this is because when this image finishes calculating it'll appear here but it will also tell me how long it took to create it so if i pull this over here we go it says basically that image took 26 seconds now the very first thing that you want to do when you want to get better quality is come over to your path tracer all right so this this is your ray tracer this is the engine behind everything in your scene now what we this is kind of like the big red button okay so so this is like nuke it from orbit um you increase this and this makes everything better so this is going to divide each of your pixels basically and give a lot more information and a lot more processing and everything will get better as a result now that's great but as you might have imagined there's a certain point that we're going to hit where it's suddenly costing us a lot of time right to to keep cranking this up um just to show you what i mean this is our image at 16 now let's uh let's put it up 64. right so this number can go really really big so like 512 or 1024 um so as i understand it it's not been squared so you want to so you might be used to seeing values like one two three four whatever and in this case you're going to go 4 8 16 32 64. that's just to try and explain what values you could expect to enter into this field here now underneath it you have anti-aliasing sample i normally leave this one alone to be honest and then i come over here to anti-aliasing filter blackman harris that's what i'm on most of the time and that should automatically switch this to looking basically three pixels around in it uh the easiest way to think of it is a bit it's a bit like a blur it kind of averages out around based on the three pixels around it so so it's very gentle in what it's doing but it is in fact sort of grabbing the pixels around it for an average now as you can see this image is taking a lot longer than 26 seconds to finish and that's where this comes in useful because you're not necessarily going to remember how long everything took or what was longer than others so here we go we've gone from 26 seconds to almost 2 minutes so the place to start with all this is going to be giving ourselves something other than the beauty just to look at because looking here is useful i mean obviously we can see noise but it's going to be more useful if we can begin to track down where that noise is specifically coming from to do that we just need to go to the aov editor make sure that you're on your image and on your layer and you have all of these options now if we go down to pbr wherever that is there we go you have diffuse especially sorry you have diffuse glossy speck uh let's pop these open uh maybe spec glossy we don't want to have more than we need and what we're going to do is grab transmission and reflection from both of those and we will just add that and then we probably don't need a mission that's an emissive object over here um i don't know we'll just grab it anyway all right and ultimately what has to happen now is it has to calculate all over again so we know that that's going to take us another two minutes um just for the sake of this i'm going to turn it down a little bit in an ideal world i reckon we probably would have wanted to stay up near that value it's just i don't want you to have to wait two minutes every time i want to talk about something which actually leads me to the next thing that we're going to talk about so i i'm just going to let this run for just have a frame of reference then what we're going to do is we're going to come over here and talk about this which is the region render now when you turn it on sorry i just messed it up well i messed it up so now i have to talk about it if you click on this here on your specific one if you haven't already done anything you might find that the whole thing is doing something like that but then when you're clicking on here and you're moving none of these things are going to do anything except for maybe select your geometry uh the trick here is that you need to hold the key x and when you hold that it allows you to select a certain part of the frame to render and the way to turn that off again is to come up here and let everything process so this is extremely useful when you're trying to you know come down here and determine what's going wrong you don't want to wait for this whole frame to go you're going to press the spacebar pull this in the middle click on the that light region render area and you're going to select what it is exactly that you want it to run now this image that it gives you as a result two seconds we know that it's probably just talking about this a little bit down here okay so i let this run out as a test frame like i said i would and now i'm going to do my best to try and show you the different places that you can go looking for noise now the first one is going to be the light itself the light itself here is just a distant light and it's got this sample count down here so this is how many um just to sort of say it from the beginning normally you you don't need a lot of samples in here you may if you have an environment light with an image in it you may find that that that initial bounce is is quite noisy but the chances are that here you're going to be okay now just to sort of show you where it is if you have a soft fall off here like we do right you may find so let me just go over here you may find that there's some noise here in this fall off okay so this is where this is going to sort of come into its own so i'm going to change this well first off we don't want to render the whole image so i'm just going to hold down the x key and highlight here let that calculate and then if i change this and i make it something high should be smoother now we're going to toggle between the two you can see that this is grainy and if we toggle back we'll see that it's smoother now i will try and make that full frame because you're going to be watching it on youtube so it's about as big as i can get it for the minute so just keep an eye on here this is the good one this is the bad one so hopefully you can see that now if you were to render this out as an image sequence you'd see all this dancing so this is a lot better right and what we did is we targeted specifically this light we were like you can have some more samples so that's great now the chances are if i had left this path tracer at a higher value so let's say 128 we would probably find that we didn't really need to give it these extra samples but let's just compare so that's at 128 just looking down here at the bottom and this is our original 16 and it is roughly the same so i don't want to confuse the issue but what i'm saying here is that this here if you increase this this is going to make everything better okay but if it's getting too expensive what you can do is start to come in and target specific noises so you can either have this lower and turn these guys up higher or you feel free to turn these guys back down and turn this guy up higher which makes everything better now you don't want to come in here and turn everything up because that's just going to give you a really long render time and probably look exactly the same so on that note we will go back to where we were we're just doing this with these numbers to make it clearer as to as to what exactly i am trying to do so i can't remember if that's what we did maybe we did 128 over here sorry i should have paid more attention but there we go so this one yep noisy this one clean all right so that's this guy here and we are able to get away with this relatively low value up here so our render is nice and speedy uh if i'd paid more attention i would have mentioned numbers that are over there but i didn't so there we go um the next thing that we want to do so don't forget that we're i'm looking at this specifically because it's a little hard to tell because you have this sort of snow over everything uh what we're going to do is we're going to go over here we're going to try and figure out where that is coming from so it's still rendering it's going to take a minute uh we don't really want to wait around for it so i'm just going to grab this part here and we're going to we're going to look at this material so this emissive light is casting light down here that's what this guy is and then we have remember this system light that we spoke about at the beginning so those two things are contributing to this um this kind of noisy effect over here how to go over exactly the same thing that we said before you increase this guy it increases everything makes this look better so 128 let it run it takes a second looking a lot better but if you look here in this corner that's still looking kind of noisy and if you were to render that out it would um dance around like i said before now obviously we can keep cranking this up or we can try and be more specific now a nice little shortcut go over here to the dropper middle click on the material that you're interested in and it will take you sorry middle click on the object you're interested in and it will take you to the material now again the same as the light if you look over here we should be able to find let me collapse all of this business we should be able to find the samples so there we go material assembly now by default the material sample count is saying use the render settings when it says that it means use what's on the path tracer so you come down and you're here you're going to see that every material in your scene is using 16 that is what the default is and you can either multiply those so you can say actually you know all of my reflections are noisy so here boost all of my reflections give them double the samples you can do it this way sure but that does every single material in your scene or if you want to be a bit more surgical with it like i said middle click on the thing that you're interested in takes you to that material you can override them from over here so here we're going to do the same thing that we just did with the light we're going to change this to 128 we're going to let it render here we've got the same region so we can see that it was 13 seconds and now it is going to be longer but that in essence what we've done is cranked up all of the samples for the material and it was almost the same so letting this render and we've increased it to 128 it really doesn't look very different right it's it's basically identical so at this point um before we sort of give up and say oh this isn't the right thing what i'm going to do is i'm going to increase this to quite a high value i'm going to say all right i'm going to give you 512 in terms of samples and we're going to let it cook for a second because hopefully what's happening is the materials basically bouncing these rays between these two edges and that's actually where our noise is coming from and if you look it already looks a lot cleaner hopefully that is clear on your screen now if i toggle between it this was the last one you can see it's quite grainy let me see if i can maximize the real estate over here i pulled it over so you can see the times all right there we go so that's the newest image and that's the old image so as you can see there the noise value is quite different and that's just from increasing so we again we middle clicked with this it brought us to that particular material i've overridden this from 16 to 512 and it has given us a much cleaner image which is over here and if we look at the time i mean it has tripled the time but the advantage is that now when it's calculating the image it's only going to give those extra samples to anything with this material on it as opposed to everything else in the scene which should give us you know help us out a lot so i mean the methodology here is is realistically what you do is you would come in you would turn that up as high as you can while still getting kind of an acceptable render time obviously you don't need to turn it up to 11 if you're getting an image that's fine but hopefully what you can do is you can turn this up and you'll be like hey i'm getting you know 99 of this image is pretty decent but what's happening is uh hopefully what we'll see here is maybe like a bit of noise here or a bit of noise in this particular mirror so then we know we don't need to turn up everything we just need to actually pay attention and sort of go in and try and modify a certain part of this image unfortunately this thing that i've just increased is in is on both of these surfaces so it's going to take a second for it to finish calculating down here but when it does i'm going to continue on and we will start looking at another noisy part all right so that took a lot longer obviously but we have cranked things up so that's to be expected um let's go on the hunt for some more noise shall we here we have uh well this is the most obvious bit so just before i dive into this little corner i want to recap real quick there are only three real places to look for noise so the first one is the path tracer turn this number up everything gets better the second one is your lights so you come over here you crank this number up and your shadows the soft falloff will get better and then your third one is the material itself that you are getting the noise from so in our case we had this material twice on two walls and as it was bouncing as the light was bouncing off this it was it was basically coming here and creating noise so we increase the sample this cleans up between the two and all we're going to do is kind of rinse and repeat that and honestly we just have a bunch of materials next to each other so the chances are we just need to find out which materials are causing the noise on what we like i said we're going to look at this part over here so i'm just going to grab this i'm just going to press x yeah we're looking for this little this little edge here uh we can see that the white light is quite noisy right so the question is is it the emissive light that's causing the noise and it needs more samples or is it this is a mirror here so the it could be the mirror itself actually needs more samples so again i'm on the eyedropper i'm going to middle click on this takes us to the dielectric the dielectric is what is being reflective for us here and we're just going to jump straight in and go with 256 and see if that actually helps to improve anything or if it stays the same so hopefully i haven't increased the render time too much let it finish calculating and we're going to toggle between the two so we see that there is an increase but it may not be as good as we were hoping for so before we totally give up on it i'm going to come over here and go 512 and again give it a moment to think and toggle between the two so it is improving but it's not improving as drastically as i would have expected so i'm just gonna wind this back down i mean it probably did need more so 128 is what i will settle on and if i toggle between 512 and 128 there is a difference but i i'm undecided right this minute so what we can do is come over to the emissive one which i think is this nope it's not that one here we go it's this disney principled one and what we're going to do is we're going to increase that so why don't we just go straight in with 512 and see if that helps sort any of the noise out so it did nothing at all so that's good to know it does in fact look like all of that noise is coming from the mirror so we can uh take this down click on the mirror like we have before and let's get make it something really big so 10 24. this will increase the render time but hopefully between 1024 and our original one which was down here somewhere there will be a noticeable difference i i'm hoping um so that was the original noise so it could still be better but we're gonna have to keep hunting i think at this point to try and figure out what exactly is causing that um let's go and have a look sorry i'm looking for the reference image which was 85 there we go so it's not going to be the glass because we know it's over here and we have tried this mirror which is over here so i don't know we could try increasing the material itself over here because it is bouncing across and then coming back so let us do that um go to the most recent image middle click on this guy sample 128 see if that makes any difference looks kind of the same all right and we're going to crank it up high 10 24 now having said all of this that there is a point where uh i was about to say i'm this is working so that's great but i was about to say there is a point where you may find that turning up your material sample counts um stops really making anything better and what it might mean is you you just have to bite the bullet and come over here and turn up the path tracer a bit but our noise in this particular case did in fact seem to be coming in part from the mirror but actually mostly it was coming from this object reflecting against itself in the mirror and then coming back um and it was solved by turning this up to a really high value so if we toggle between the two that's uh what it was as a default and that is what it is now the trick at this point is to try and lower it to an acceptable value so you want to try and keep it fast but you want to get rid of the noise so 256 we have our noise back so let's go up to 512. we'll just keep an eye on it over here um yeah i mean 512 we're going to be out here so you might find that 512 is plenty but you know now now you know this is how you've deconstructed the image you now know where that noise is coming from so obviously 1024 is going to be better but it might not be worth the additional render time so there we go that's where it was that's what it is now that is a significant uh increase so right now i'm just renting and repeating in the image but if you want to also go one step further and talk about bounces specifically uh they're the things that are going to save you a lot of time now i'll just show you where they are i think it might be sort of out of the scope of what i want to cover today but these are kind of my default settings they might actually be the default settings now i'm not i'm not totally sure but the idea is is to you have these um indirect balances as low as you can possibly get them now what does that mean these are the number of bounces that the rays are going to make around your scene before they die and there are certain things that you've got in here such as transmission right and the transmission is something that pertains to glass uh if you guys don't mind i'm actually gonna sort of skip this last render that i said i was gonna do and i'm just gonna talk about the glass for for just a moment um now what's happening is the ray is in essence hitting the glass and it's so that's one and then it's going through the glass so that's two all right and we have enough bounces here for that for that to work right so it's going through coming back to and now we will see this go wrong if we duplicate our glass and push it back and what you see here is um hold on i just want to make sure i'm telling you the truth and not going through a wall horror glass so there's there's our original one there's the one i just made and for good measure i'm gonna make one more and push it behind that awesome come over here press play now what happens here is you see that it's it can handle one piece of glass or one face it can handle a second piece of glass so a second face but what happens is as soon as it hits the third it runs out of rays right it can no longer make it through the scene so the way around that is that you want to go over here and i'm just going to guess here that it was the specular transmission yeah so when i do that it's going all the way through and then you know it's not totally making it all the way back but it's still working okay now we can increase this further we can go four but make sure that you change the maximum to four right so we change everybody and we're getting a bit more of an image but in essence that's what this means okay so you only ever want this set to the minimum required to get your array to go through the scene uh the reason well because it's expensive we don't just leave all of these things here at really high values because you don't actually need it so what you want to do is have these as low as possible while still being able to see your image so in this case that would be too low because this stuff is going black but um that was just for the demo so we don't actually need to do it so i'm going to delete it and we're going to look through it and everything's going to be fine um hopefully that wasn't too much information but just to recap we have the path tracer this is like the central hub of where everything is happening if you just want everything to look better turn this up and if you want to give it a bit of a nicer edge you're going to change this from whatever it is box or whatever at the beginning to blackman harris it will automatically change here you don't need to think about it we can go down if you want to change all the materials in the scene you can if you want to change the global number of bounces you can you can use your aovs to come in here you can take a look at the light itself and the falloff in the shadows is going to be where that value comes in or where those samples are going to help you out and if we click on the light in this particular scene and we scroll down we will find them under sampling here and then what we want to do is for the rest of it you're probably going to want to look at the materials and try and figure out which materials are aggravating the renderer and then give them more samples specifically instead of just giving more samples to everything in your scene and like we discussed the easiest way to do that is with the use of the eyedropper you come over here you find the thing that looks bad middle click on it it will take you to that and then you can override its material sample count over here and the trick here is to have it just high enough to clean up the noise that you're looking at but you don't want to waste a bunch of samples going a lot higher than you need to i hope that helped and if that wasn't clear let me know and i will try and do a better job of explaining it next time [Music]

Channel: James Miller

Views: 872

Keywords: Isotropix, Clarisse, Tutorial, How to, AMD, Instruction, Spotlight, James Miller, Nomad, VFX Nomad, vfxnomad, Dreamworks, ILM, DNEG, material, materiallinker, linker, VFX, guide, instruction, nomad, materials, override, shading, layer, shadinglayer, threadripper, ryzen, crypto, cryptomatte, mask, masks, ID, IDs, matte, install, nuke, psyops, download, layers, shadinglayers, pyro, volumes, vdb, procedural, shaders, triplanar, noise, render, settings

Id: NqMd4k61Apo

Length: 25min 7sec (1507 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020