How to Speed Up Your Renders #Autodesk

welcome back to my channel today's video will be super exciting we'll be talking about how to get clean and fast renders i'll be talking about how to denoise images using arnold's noise denoiser how to optimize your scenes to get the most efficient render times and also we were talking about how to use nuke a compositing software to actually denoise your images and we'll be comparing all the results to find the best result for you which makes your runners the most beautiful and pretty ones but before we get our hands dirty i first of all want to thank the sponsor of today's video which is autodesk a huge software company responsible for several dccs including 3ds max autocad and also autodesk maya which we'll be using today maya is used in almost every studio it's used for gaming it's used for animation it's used for visual effects for effects for everything it's quite amazing i'll be using this for look dev and lighting using arnold's render engine so uh let's just get into it and get going with the optimizing unit all right as you can see we are back in maya with a quite interesting see nice lighting moods and a different uh kind of approach this time first of all i want to thank johnny faye who actually provided me this scene he's a quite talented artist um you can check him out on art station he's got very nice work he also has like grunge maps um which you can buy also there's a link for that in the description below he's got nice renders this is actually the render he did which is i think a lot nicer than what i'm cam came up with and um he's also on instagram check him out johnny fair uh quite a talented artist and it's great to have him here and also he's quite active on my discord community make sure to join it as well the link is in the description too and so let's jump back into the scene um we have a quite basic setup we've got two lights or three maybe and then it's mainly driven by render settings and the first thing we want to do is talk about render settings the defaults are three two two two if you install a new arnold version and this is the default settings you get and the render with those default settings looks like this you can see we have a little bit of noise here and there but all in all it's quite clean um the render settings at the render times for this are roughly a minute on my machine here this is a full 1080p and then you obviously want to optimize this and it's very important to keep your render times small and your image quality high and so there needs to be some kind of optimization being done here and quite important is obviously the a samples three two two two is a quite good low settings but for me i have it actually way low i have it on two one one and i also make sure my raid effort says one as well that way we do not have any additional bounces and for with these render settings um the result will essentially look like this it's a bit more noisy but the render here now is like eight seconds and if i um actually render now you can see now we have a very fast interactive scene i can switch my camera to perspective and you can see now if i toggle around everything is nice and fast and uh it's quite fun to work like that and that's that's something which you guys should do as well if you do lighting or look different make sure your scenes are fast so you can have way more iterations and this is something i do all the time um so the next step is how would you actually get cleaner render so one obviously would be to increase ua samples and make it look great what i've seen quite often those render settings which are through the roof i've seen um settings uh not 100 but 10 10 10 um and this is if people don't really know what what to set and they just think okay 10 10 10 is good maybe it's similar and different dccs but essentially these settings are extremely high and very over sampled because a samples are multiplied by itself so it's 100 samples and then it's multiplied with diffuse specular and transmissive which are also multiplied by itself so you've got quite a few samples this is 100 times 100 which is 10 000 samples for indirect diffuse which is way too high good render settings for instance would be if it would be a 10 1 1 scenario um this would be great for motion blur and this will actually get quite good results for you as well so what i want to do in this video today is i want to show you guys how to set up your scene so it's the most efficient as possible this is applicable to pretty much any render engine um which uses a pbr workflow so they all have samples and it's quite similar to most of them especially i'm talking about v-ray and random quite similar approaches so what i want to do here i want to optimize this shot here so um i want to essentially render this with 2-1-1-1 and just see how how things going if i look for my render camera here and this is what we have and obviously you can see we have noise but one thing which i see quite often happening is now you get the noise here especially in the shadows people will just push ua samples until it's clean this is the first approach and but most of the time for shadow samples um it's the reasons are different so if you can if you stay at two one uh one you can see that we have we're back with the noise here but now let's let's let now let's find the light which is actually this one here which is causing the shadow so it's quite important to set your light samples as well like if i would put like three samples for this light you can already see um it's incr dramatically better it's a lot cleaner from one which is the default the two or two even three makes a huge difference so i always encourage you guys to set your light samples to two but obviously test it out don't just set everything to two make sure there is actually a visual difference and then the cool thing is you don't need to crank your a samples up as much anymore for instance you could now you can see this is the diffuse interact you can now lift the diffuse and it gets even cleaner so you don't need to go always all the time with your a samples and then another important thing is the raid depth you do you do want to increase it but you don't want to go too crazy it's mainly interesting for interior scenes where you have more light bouncing around and you when you when you see a difference from changing it from one to two depth and you see the brightness it gets brighter that's a good thing right so you want to keep pushing that but at a certain level mainly around three to four some ray depth you don't see a visually any big difference anymore that's a time when you should stick with the lower one so there's a small difference from three to four just stick with three because it's good enough and the same with specular specular though is mainly a lot lower than that so keep in mind for for this exterior shot i don't care much about bounces i don't have any bright objects which i want to cast light so i keep it at one which is very efficient so that's also something which you need to adjust accordingly so in in today's video i rendered different samples and different versions so i have a two one one one i have a four two two um and i have a 10 to one i believe so um this is now my render settings with two one one one and this is in six seconds render and i have the 422 which is already cleaner which is a what was it i i think it was around 50 seconds render and then we do have the 10 10 to 1 which for me i find is my grand truth which is the cleanest render i'm which i'm producing and this took around four minutes to render so that's the difference right a super clean render looks great but four minutes or a very low sample render which takes uh six or eight seconds to render but it's noisy right so now the the reason for this video is i want to show you guys how you can make um clean renders with the fastest render times and we will be doing some denoising we will be doing some nuke denoising we'll be doing some topaz denoising and obviously we'll be using arnold steen as well so for the denoising part it's actually not that difficult lots of people ask me how to do this and all you have to do essentially is go to your render settings go to aovs tab it's quite similar to all the other arnold dcc's you just go to the denoising tab uh make actually sure that your output denoising aovs are turned on and i'm not talking about optics denoiser optics is just for the interactive scene the current render just to have a nicer smoother first pixel essentially but for final renders you want to use the arnold's denoiser which is internally called noise and you do want to output nz and albedo which is which is helping the denoiser to get even better results so make sure you output nz and albedo and also make sure that the output denoising aovs is on which is essentially a variance a of v and then in your common tab make sure that merge aovs is on and preserve layer name that just helps the denoiser find the correct paths and it will denote actually all right so that's all you have to do to set it up but it's a post render render essentially so you have to go to arnold menu go to utilities arnold denoiser find your rendered frame so you obviously do first your original render plug it in here it will automatically append denoised which will be your new output path and then you've got a few settings one is render like the frame range and then you have temporal stability frames which means um how many frames before and after the current frame should the noise the denoiser look at to get a cleaner result it's a good range between two and five the more you add the longer it will take for your denoise or to denoise so i found good results with two i also found better results with three to four but again it's up to you variance essentially is just the strength of how strong are these noises lower values are more noisy higher values are smoother but you lose the detail so you got to test it out with your specific shots excel surge radius and pixel patterns are quite similar pixel search radius means from the current pixel look nine pixel around yourself and denoise that area and the patch radius will look for three different patches in that current radius and see in the other temporal frames how which one is the clean and just combined light group avs enables you to denoise um light aob especially if you have your key light separated your rim light separated they can be denoised too but this is not actually denoising your auvs or specular or diffuse passes so this is not what it's essentially all you got to do hit denoise and noise does the work it takes around 50 to 1 seconds to one minute on my machine so i did a little case study with three different render settings one was two one one one four two two two and ten two one and then denoised all of them and now it's time to compare them and see actually what the results are all right here we are in nuke now and you can see now we do have our renders and this is essentially the raw runner we had before you can see it's quite noisy then we have the four two two and then we have the ten two one one and this is the cleanest i rent it out uh it takes like six seconds um 50 seconds and then four minutes or something like that so that's actually 74 seconds for this frame and now let's look at the denoise results right so each of them i ran with the same denoise settings and this is now for the two one one one denoise settings so you can see um it's still quite noisy this is before this is after it loses a bit of intensity but you can see it's definitely cleaner but you can see it's like floppy and all that um then for the future two difference is um so this is the raw render see it's noisy here in the shadow area but now if i switch on the denoiser you can already see now this already looks nice and clean now and see there's still some little bit of flickering going on in these areas here but it's quite clean already and for the ground truth which is a ten to one you can see the raw's quite clean already with the denoiser it's just as very smooth right but this essentially takes the longest to compute and then also i did a secondary approach i used neat video which is a industry standard denoising tool which is mainly used for plates but i use neat video also for that digital cleanup right so this here now is with the neat video on top so this is the raw render and this is now with nukes or with the plugin need video and if you actually want to check it out neat video i do have a affiliate link in the description below if you want to check it out and download that as well it's very powerful i will go quickly into the settings so you can see how powerful it is and again this is now a six or seven second render and this is now denoise it in nuke and you can see it's is literally it's almost instantaneous so this is already a very surprising result i didn't expect that especially comparing neat video which is nukes the noise or a plug-in for nuke and then comparing that with noise you can see this is the noise denoiser and you can see on the stairs it's quite flickery actually but then with neat video it's quite clean already very interesting all right so now let's quickly look how i set up the neat video because it's actually quite simple i do have it here reduce noise is what it's called and i'll just plug that directly into my raw render so this is the raw render here's the need video double click that go to prepare nose noise profile and you have to do that just to get things started so essentially what you do is um again i'm not a compositor but i find my way around things so i just hit generic profile and then you pick an area where you see lots of uniform noise right all right so then you have the option to use the generic noise to adjust the noise levels i just do it until i see a quite smooth result here on the left and then i play around with the luminance until i get less noise in the brighter areas but this is setting up your base profile and then you jump over to the next tab here adjust and preview you can already see now if i zoom in here a little this is already a very satisfying result here you can see if i click before and after like most of the noise is already gone so one thing to do is you can adjust the temporal radius and this is essentially how many frames are being looked at for denoising so i'll just crank it up all the way to five which gives it it takes longer but it gives you a cleaner result and then you can clean up the noise itself so let's see we want to get rid of this jumping noise here which is quite apparent below in this area and just increase the noise levels and you can see now this really cleans it up you can use repeated frames if you have similar noise patterns from frame to frame which we actually do so this might help as well to get rid of some noise you can see it gets nice and clean off at play this noise which we had before is essentially vanish right so before and after right it's it's a big deal and it's very impressive how clean is actually is you can change the quality mode to high which i just did because i have a strong gpu here and it just does it essentially on the fly and then i just hit apply if i stop to the original exposure values now you can see we have a very um clean image here and this is again from this render to this here with neat videos super impressive again from this render to the noise also very impressive so both are actually equally not equally good but very good like for a six second render plus denoise it's very cool the next step is the 422 obviously now it gets better and better so the raw runner gets better and then neat video does a better job and your noise does a better job as well so this is the the uh this is the raw render this is with neat video on top and still see we've got a little bit of flickering and then this is the noise one which i find is better than neat video so this is now before two two it's it's a bit tricky to decide but then we have ten to one which is our ground truth plus denois plus i need video on top there's just no noise left it's just the cleanest render i've ever seen and then you have the noise version which is also extremely clean just to top it all off i also did a topaz gigapan denoiser which is this one it does not have temporal stability um so that's how it looks without it you can see it's quite jittery is not the best result so i would not recommend this for cgi for videos in general great for stills but not for video all right so let's recap what we did we rendered three images with different sample settings we went into arnold's denoiser set up a few parameters and denoised those three runners as well so essentially got six image sequences and then we went into nuke and we did some other denoising as well so we used neat video which is a plug-in the affiliate link is in the description below if you want to check that out and then i also use topaz for the free trial for denoising the image and then we just compared all the results and the results were super interesting to be honest with you so the results speak pretty much for themselves like the highest quality you get with the highest render settings they take the longest or white right but it's a pretty image but then you also get the lower end of the spectrum as low range settings fast render times and we need to find the nice balance in which and the results i got were quite interesting um for the sense that if you want to have fast runners go low on the ea samples and get very noisy image but make sure you don't have fireflies and stuff like that and then you should do either arnold's denoiser noise to get clean images or you go into a third party which is nuke and neat video to clean up your renders and the results i found was super interesting neat video performed extremely well especially on the temporal noise i was really impressed by that and i think i will be using that in future or arnold's noise the noise it's also very impressive from that really low noisy image it got a quite clean result and it was not as good as neat video but it was pretty close to it and for the middle ground i would i would recommend if you want to go for really good quality images i would recommend probably going into a low to mid range sample settings for rendering picking that off making sure you don't have fireflies because they are very hard to get rid of and then with that image you go into denoising you either do a denoise with arnold it takes longer though it takes like 50 to 1 50 seconds to like roughly 80 seconds per frame to denoise one image depending on the temporals ability or you just completely use neat video any other denoising um application and the the speed gain you get is quite impressive so neat video is roughly it's not it's almost instant right it's like 40 frames per second at least that's with my configuration so so my conclusion would be try to get a mid-range render settings and denoise it either the either noise with arnold or a neat video these are the most impressive results i've seen so far i hope this video was interesting for you this was something very different and again i want to thank the sponsor of today's video which was autodesk maya much appreciated for the support on on this platform here and then also check out johnny fair who provided me the scene the link is in the description below and also if you want to check out neat video do your own test it's also um the affiliate link is in the description below and if you want to check out the scene files if you want to check out the rendered results i gotta do your own comparisons all the source files all the denoise files are all uploaded to my dropbox so be sure to check it out if you want to do so it's available on my patreon with the link again in the description below so thanks everyone for your support i really appreciate it and i hope you enjoyed this kind of video see you in the next [Music] me

Channel: Arvid Schneider

Views: 37,605

Keywords: arvid schneider, vfx, maya, autodesk maya, maya 2020, maya 2022, arnold, arnold renderer, maya 3d, 3d, 3d modelling, 3d texturing, lookdev, rendering, 3d rendering, lighting, 3d lighting, maya tutorial, cgi, visual effects, hollywood vfx, vfx tutorial, vfx effects, autodesk, 3d tutorial, simulation, fx, render, surfacing, shading, 3dsmax, fast renders, nuke, 3d render, denoiser, tutorial, blender 3d, renderman, renderman 23, cycles, c4dtoa, redshift, octane, mantra, vray, htoa, mtoa, 3d modeling

Id: 3kRRWwF6GDo

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020