Exclude from denoising per material or object

[leehenshall]

The denoiser does a great job....

But sometimes it denoises certain materials/objects too much. I am wondering whether artists could control this by communicating to octane not to denoise certain objects or materials.

A good example of excessive denoising are carpaint flakes. The denoiser makes the car paint look too smooth. Even at low samples the car paint looks better on the undenoised render.

I could render a non denoised and denoised pass and use a material matte to mask out the car paint in post. But it would be nice to be able to do this in render whilst working.

It is possible that with the next round of improvements to the denoiser it will be better equipped to handles this kind of scenario.

[pegot]

+1
I have run into this situation too and would love to be able to set denoising per object or material.

[karl]

I could render a non denoised and denoised pass and use a material matte to mask out the car paint in post. But it would be nice to be able to do this in render whilst working.

Coming in 2022.1 there's a new type of output AOV - cryptomatte mask - and you can use this in conjunction with a composite output AOV to achieve this in the render while working. This is effectively the same as being able to denoise per object or material, with a little bit more artist control (but also complexity). There's even a picking tool so you can interactively toggle objects/materials by clicking them in the viewport.

[pegot]

Great news! I have had cases where denoising and use of a Shadow Matte cased very bad artifacts and bluring - no matter how many samples were used. I hope the cryptomatte and AOV system will fix that as well.

[leehenshall]

Excellent news!

I did look for a cryptomatte node in the Octane compositor but couldn't find one. Very pleased to find out this is coming soon.

Live node based compositing is such a great feature and is a good solve for this request.

Thankyou.