I love everything about the renewed Cycles - beside this one thing. I have to agree I really miss the C-Burley SSS - it was inaccurate yes, but didn’t have darkening artifacts like Random Walk tends to
Different topic:
I just downloaded the latest build (09-27)
Denoising doesn’t work in render just in the viewport. I have no idea if I’m setting up something wrong but it doesn’t seem like it. OptiX is turned on but it doesn’t happen as I watch the render unfold.
Also when the render is finished and after it says “reading full buffer from disk” the end result just turns black. (all channels are kept intact, only the Combined pass turns black)
I must mention I render a huge image ( ~ 3500x5300px ) and the black end result only happens with auto-tiles ON - if I render it in one big chunk, the end result stays there.
Please let CPU rendering see some love, it felt back compared to GPU performance, CyclesX CPU even felt back behind old Cycles. We have a lot of older CPU render clients and meaningful GPUs are so expensive right now.
I am unable to reproduce with the latest master. I believe this was fixed with a recent commit, or it might be a Windows only issue? Not sure. Please report a bug for this if you can still reproduce this in the latest master. https://developer.blender.org/
If you want Christensen SSS back you should provide images and/or files showing off what doesn’t work with random walk to help with your persuasion. Some of the issues you’re experiencing may be planned to be fixed and are on this list: ⚓ T91540 Cycles: improve subsurface scattering for some meshes shapes
I am not a Blender or Cycles developer so my comments are mostly speculation. But it seems like the Cycles team want to support every major GPU manufacturer and OS they can. They just need the right tools available, time, money, and knowledge for working with the tools. So it’s possible that some point in the future Cycles will get a MacOS GPU compatible backend.
GPU support on MacOS would come quickly if Apple were to donate developers to help implement support (similar to what AMD and Nvidia does), but at the moment Apple’s involvement in Blender/Cycles seems rather limited.
I posted recently under the specific task you linked.
Brecht’s answer is that the mesh of an object must be a single continuous volume. They will only try to fix artifacts which appear when this continuous mesh intersects itself.
This is a Random Walk requirement as it’s based on a more realistic simulation of light scatter - it wasn’t a requirement for Burley.
There it was enough to have multiple meshes joined into one object. They could still be separate meshes and SSS would treat them as one with no artifacts.
This is a pretty big drawback of Random walk.
could you please render the scene in Blender 2.93.5 and use the Blender Denoiser
NLM. Best one render with the default settings in the denoiser-setting-options (8px)
and once with 24px.
@slowburn: your .blend file can not be downloaded anymore, otherwise I would
have tested it myself…
The rendered scenes of JohnDow show clearly how bad ODIN works in Blender
(post from 10 September) ODIN clearly shows cloud formation and texture loss.
All the development work on Cycles X brings absolutely nothing if we have to
set the sample rates so high for noise-free images that we end up rendering
longer than with cycles and we also have to accept texture loss, that makes
absolutely no sense.
@ Blender Developer: port the NLM Denoiser for Cycles X, because NLM works
much better in dark scenes than ODIN or Optix, and with less samples…
NLM works also better in detailed scenes (fine structures and complex textures)
Please also think about the usability (enduser) it should be all easier, but quite the
opposite is the case. Even if 3.0 still has alpha status, so it is foreseeable
that you have to fumble around in various places, and also in the compositor,
to get noise-free images.
Why all this?
100% Agree, specially for stylized renders where having realistic simulation of SSS is not the main goal. Random walk looks beautiful for realistic stuff but it’s pretty hard to control when looking for a more cartoony look.
Actually I asked Brecht, he said the OIDN in the render settings works the same as the denoise node, and my latest test does show that the two are the same, and the denoiser is by default checked and have “accurate” prefilter mode selected, so there is really no extra work for the users here.
@ Eary
at such extremely low sample rates ODIN is clearly better than NLM,
also Optix is then clearly better, but 5 or 10 sampels are not realistic!
The problems become obvious when high resolution images are needed,
with fine textures and structures; then both ODIN and Optix produce
ugly and unacceptable blurry spots (clouds) and you loose texture.
This can be clearly seen in the example images at the beginning of
PetrTarasov’s post. Look at the leather texture.
If you need an animation in “High Res” another disadvantage of ODIN and
Optix becomes visible; the cloud formation and the texture loss lead to
a “pulsing” like with timeshift recordings, because the AI does not take
the noise of the preceding image sufficiently into calculation, so it
becomes “unpredictable” because other places are always affected; this
is completely unusable. We had already solved the problem halfway with
“seed”, now it’s back again…
As others have recommended, you try new OIDN “Prefilter” None and Accurate options.
Generally “None” is the one that best preserves fine textures. As long as you don’t render with extreme low render samples “None” may be best for interior renders. For animation perhaps Accurate is the best mode.
If someone finds that in some scene NLM denoiser still gives clearly better results than new OIDN, the .blend file should be shared here so developers can discuss it.
Never heard of any company using expensive macs as render slaves. From our own renderfarm experience I can say that you are buying in bulk so buy whatever X systems render best for your Y money. Normally you can get twice the PC CPU render-power vs. Mac CPU render-power for the same money. Plus the flawlessly working CUDA / RTX GPUs on Windows. If you can, go CPU on Linux, but GPU rendering on Linux is suboptimal too. Buy optimised, as simple as possible machines, but sturdy. There is no need for super durable, expensive render slaves, but they will run 24/7, so good, reliable cooling (air cooling, watercooling isn’t that reliable or too expensive). Some of your render slaves will break over the months/years, it isn’t a problem, the renderpower of the farm will only be diminished by very low % at a time. No need for expensive same day/24 h support. Buy more slaves instead. Buy less, stronger machines instead of many, cheap ones, costs for electricity /renderere licenses will be less and you will have your frames rendered faster. 100 slow machines will render the whole animation in the same time as 10 10x times faster ones but you will kill yourself waiting for that last few frames in the animations to finally finish or will hate yourself on huge print pics with the many, slow slaves.
@Eary
thank you for sharing this two pictures, but their are only showing the difference between ODIN 1.3 and 1.4. ODIN 1.3 kills all textures on the pillows; 1.4 shows texture on the pillow, but you can see there is something wrong with the texture on the left pillow. The seat area shows some blurry, spotty, uneven, areas areas where there should be more (where is the texture)
Without an comparable image without denoiser and high sample rate (2000 or 4000 samples = noisefree) and a rendersample with the same sample rate like in the demo picture above, and NLM settings to 24px, we have nothing to discuss (to compare)
@YAFU
You are right, with these settings in ODIN the result is much better, but the texture
loss is still visible, ODIN just destroys a lot of details and brings additional spots
into the image.
You can see this in the new pictures of JohnDow.
Look at the wooden panels to the right and left of the TV, especially in the gaps
between the slats you can see that ODIN creates dark areas where there should be
none. ODIN also destroys the details/texture of the seat backs and the paper box in
the foreground. Also the screen (reflection) shows the clouds/spots.
NLM shows more noise in the new images from JohnDow, but also much less loss
of texture, and also creates no washed out spots.
The SuperImageDenoiser does the best job(!) much better than Optix and ODIN,
no matter at which settings.
SID and NLM do the best job of preserving texture and detail.
JohnDow does not write with which setting in NLM he rendered with, I guess 8px
(std), would be interesting to see that with 24px. A few more samples or a bit more
render time are worth it, if you can keep the texture and details. We want fast and
good, not just fast, don’t we!?
