Denoise with Arnold (NOICE) in Maya

hello everyone in this video we are going to learn how to use arnold's native denoiser or noise not only to get a much cleaner result but also to save time on render time at the same time my name is reza and welcome to my channel [Music] the arnold denoiser is a stand-alone program post-process denoiser which is now embedded inside autodesk maya as long as you install arnold on your machine during the installation process now it works on exr files with multiple layers and the output is also going to be an exr file which is 32-bit file it's a great choice if you rely on cpus for rendering to enhance the quality of your render now back to the scene i have a fairly simple setup this scene is accessible via my patreon page i put the link in the description below that would be the first link you see and it allows you to go to the site and download the scene so you can follow along but it's a fairly simple setup i've got all the geos in one group obviously and the lights in one group i've got a sunlight an hdr light a portal light and a fill light and don't worry i'll put together a tutorial on that to show you my approach on lighting this scene it was tons of fun so with that amount of lights you will be getting some noise that's out of question now let's have a look at the samples i'm gonna go to render settings by the way another way to access this window is to go to rendering render and render settings i've got arnold set up in the common tab really there is not much in here i've got two cameras selected i'm going to get rid of one camera preset 5 40 i can set it to 720p i'm going to go to render setup arnold renderer tab and i've got the samplings open a sample set to 3 and diffuse specular transmission subsurface scattering volume indirect all set to 2 and that is the default i've got ray depth set to 10 and number of bounces set to 2 4 diffuse i've got no motion blur and nothing else so everything is set to default now with everything else set to default i'm going to go to rendering menu set i'm going to go to arnold and hit render let's see how long this scene is going to take it's a fairly big scene and i've got good number of polygons in there so it shouldn't be like five minutes render altogether and we're doing 720p i would suspect it's going to be around a minute maybe a minute 15 seconds something along those lines let's just wait and see so it wasn't too bad actually 58 seconds is pretty good for this scene but you can see if i zoom in we've got awful amount of noise in there now the first reaction from many users is just to go into render settings and bump up aaa samples before we do that i'm just going to save this snapshot by clicking on this snapshot button so we save that a a sample of three let's go into render settings and let's double the aaa sample so something like six now let's see how long this will take and how much noise we can remove with this method [Music] now the render is done and look at that we doubled the number of aaa samples and our render time tripled so it's three minutes 32 seconds now the reason i'm showing you this because i want you to know how important it is to know a tool like noise that not only improves on your on the quality of your render but also you will about to see it will save you tons of time now let's review again i'm going to go full screen zoom in a little this is with a sample of three this is with the sample of six of course we're talking about aa samples the camera samples now with that in mind let's prepare the scene for noise i'm going to minimize this and go straight into my render settings i'm going to start with common now it is very important to kind of think about what sort of settings we would like to have for file output rollout because noise works with image format exr we want to use merged aovs we will be getting some help from some aovs to give noise more information on the noise and where to locate the noise so merge aovs need to be ticked on we also want to enable preserve layer name and it is recommended by autodesk so that arnold denoisin can automatically detect what each aov corresponds to we're helping out and guiding the denoising system that's all you need to do of course you can go in there and set this to sequence you can change your camera resolution so on and so forth with arnold denoiser i'm just going to revert this to a value of 3 so our a sample is now set to 3 and i'm going to leave everything else at the value of two remember we had 58 seconds on this and that should not increase much i'm going to go to system make sure cpu is selected i'm going to go to aov now in here we would like to enable output denoising aovs and that's going to enable noise in the aov browser we would like to have normal and position an albedo in again this is going to help noise to detect and find noise so it can improve the result that's all it matters here i'm going to go to common probably would be a good idea to name this i'm going to call this noise raw so this is something that is unchanged and close with that i'm gonna go to render render sequence option box make sure camera is selected of course you need to make sure that you set project accordingly as well and the image will be written into images folder i'm gonna click on render sequence and close now it rendered out fairly quickly even with those three aovs you can see we are exactly on 5758 seconds so no change in the render time and now we should have a physical file to run it through the denoiser i'm going to minimize that i'm going to go to render and let's find the denoiser you need to go to utilities arnold denoiser or noise and in here you have two paths input and output i'm going to click on input and go to images and here's my noise raw i'm going to select that and automatically arnold puts the denoised version in the same folder feel free to change that path if need be you can run the sequence go start frame and start or end frame or complete sequence usually complete sequence is what you want now we have further options to tweak starting with variance which is probably the most important attribute it's the strength of the filter now the higher the variance the more forceful the denoising will be what autodesk suggests is 0.25 as default or 0.5 or 0.75 there are good low min and max values don't change it to something unusual like 10 otherwise what you get is going to be quite bizarre i'm going to set that to 0.5 i think 0.5 is a good value but if you feel like you still have noise you can definitely push that to 0.75 or so now pixel search radius works very similar to other denoiser engines where the system finds a pixel and tries to soften the the neighboring region and nuke does the same thing so you can increase it to get a better result but it costs you time so it's going to add to your render time and kind of defeats the purpose if you increase it too high the highest i go with this is about 21 or so which is like a search window of 42 by 42 and that gives me the the highest possible softening for the neighboring areas it blends better so if you have splotchiness or areas that are a bit or if you see patchiness probably you need to increase that and you get a better result again i'm going to leave that at nine i found that that the default settings actually pretty good now we have patch radius as well and it's responsible for softening the result you got to be very careful with this not to change it too much the default of three is pretty good you can lower it down to one or increase it to 5 but anything above 5 would again give you really bad results light group aov is something that is definitely beyond the scope of this tutorial but just so you know you can always write in a command line and reference your light with a dash l and reference to your light group aovs which is within your lighting settings we haven't talked about this anything you put in there will give you an error now with that said let's go and de-noise you can see how quick that was i didn't speed up the video that was actually real time it took few seconds let's go and open the arnold view renderer i'm gonna go into folder use snapshot folder and use this folder to bring those two images so i can compare them now this is our raw image and this is with the noise and a look at that that is remarkable there is still a slight amount of patchiness that i can fix up by increasing the variance increasing the pixel search radius to something like 15 but what i'm getting right off the bat with no tweaks is remarkable so before after before after if i zoom here now you probably see the difference and with no increase in render time it's just gold now you know how to approach this you can go back and fine tune this you can probably lower the patch radius to lower the softness a little bit and increase the search radius to make the blend happen better you can increase the variance to make the plug-in work forcefully and add to better result and it's going to just add few seconds to your render time which i still think it's a bargain thank you again for watching this video again this scene is available on my patreon page feel free to download it so you can follow along apart from that stay safe and see you guys soon

Channel: SARKAMARI

Views: 67,586

Keywords: arnold denoise, NOICE Maya, Denoising renders Maya, Maya Denoising, Maya 2020 lighting tutrial, Reza Sarkamari, Arnold NOICE, maya denoiser arnold, maya optix denoiser, maya noise render, arnold denoiser, arnold denoiser maya, arnold denoiser noice

Id: YSAcFE_x-Ds

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021