I made this fully with the Cycles-X builds (to test the speed and the flow originally), on Win 10, 2070 Super. It actually does not render properly with the regular 3.0 Alpha builds, I get large dark blocks across the image.
This whole 1920x1080 composited image (with couple view layers) renders at 2:28 with 256 samples and 0.001 noise threshold which what I used for my test renders and it is pretty good for the workflow in my view. The final render used 2000 samples for the main face.
I used 96 samples with denoise (had quite a bit of fireflies at that rate) while roughing out the look and I think the render time was around 1 min.
Overall this is a complicated scene with a lot of displacements, geometries, detail levels at different frequencies, a bunch of metal and dielectric materials, lots of subsurface calculations and Cycles-X performed very well.
Thanks for the image, it looks great. We may be able to use it.
Note that in general for the release notes we are looking for renders that demonstrates a particular new feature. For example showing the new shadow catcher, or a before/after image to show improved denoising quality.
Is there a specific feature or improvement that can be demonstrated with this render? It’s not clear to me that a before/after by itself would show a big difference.
That foggy scene looks like a good demonstration for improved volume denoising, we should be able to use that. The kitchen scene doesn’t really show much difference to me.
Taking one of the demo scenes from blender.org and modifying them can be an easy way to get a better looking demo image. A simple object on a plan can also be enough, but I would try to make a more realistic composition and use another mesh, A monkey intersecting a plane is a bit too much programmer art.
Mainly, for this kind of smaller feature I think just 2 images is enough. A 43 second video is too long, and we also try to avoid having the entire Blender UI visible in demo images/videos like this.
The kitchen shows little difference to me. For the foggy scene there is a lot of low frequency noise in the foggy regions that gets eliminated, not sure if that is the detail you are referring to or something else.
You are right that this was not a comparative purpose scene. To me, it was mainly an iterative workflow enhancement that came with the improved render speeds and the simplified settings with the noise handling. My main goal was to use Cycles-X for quicker iterations. I felt like Cycles-X viewport updates were less laggy.
Switching between both detail images shows a stark difference especially on surfaces that are obscured by volume, yes -especially prevalent near light sources. Surface detail is lost, specks of rust on the pipes are completely gone, high frequency noise in the concrete texture (overhang right over the passageway) is blurred into a homogeneous surface.
The very dark spots (metal grates at the top, etc) seems to preserve detail better in 3.0 however.
It’s hard to say what the result is supposed to look like without comparing to a converged image without denoising, it can also be that previous some contrast was incorrectly boosted due to the volume not affecting the albedo pass. But yes, in some of the areas that presumably have significant noise, it’s choosing to remove low frequency noise artifacts at the cost of some detail.
I understand that this comparison lacks a ground truth, however it seems reasonably obvious to me that some of the detail in the 2.93-rendered image is not denoising artifact in nature, but texture detail.
The question is: what denoising method has been used?
Because ther result vary.
None: The best one, if you have a fully clean albedo an normal, it brings back TONS of detail
Performance: the quickest one, similar to the old one, still better than the 2.93 version
Quality: like “None”, except it denoise the Albedo and the Normal pass in case they are not fully clean.
The default is Performance, but I usually set None because Albedo and Normal are usually clean enough to be considered clean for this, and the results are pretty awesome.
the kithen closeups seem pretty similar. There is small artifacts and differences in the softness of the shadow over the cabinet, but detail-wise I don’t spot that much of a difference. They aren’t perfectly aligned though, so maybe i’m missing something.
The foggy scene has a lot more differences, and at first glance it seems that it is losing detail, specially in the background (the foggiest part). That being said, the blotchy feeling in the 2.93 version leads me to think that it is not detail but artifacts introduced by the denoiser.
Here are some comparisons:
foggy scene cropped version. Side to side comparisons:
Kitchen difference (the two renders didn’t perfectly aligned, it may be exaggerated because of it. I tried to manually correct it, but still not perfect)
Kitchen scene. The things that stand out the most to me are the difference in softness (maybe they are not the exact same settings?, and the top of the bricks, which in the 2.93 version have a dark outline of sorts, instead of a clean highlight)
If I remember correctly, that scene has to be purchased, maybe something accessable for free could be good to use. Italian Flat should work: Demo Files — blender.org
(Note: There are some artifacts that show up when using OIDN with prefiltering at “low” resolutions. I believe this is just an issue of OIDN treating extreme texture detail as noise)
Other options could be adaptations of Luxcore demo files, or more original files like what you shared in other comments.
Edited to update images to be a comparison between 2.93 and 3.0 instead of 3.0 with different settings. Also worked to remove some of the artifacts from the geometry of the couch.
