Grainy image... :-(

[madcoo]

Hi everyone
I'm currently working on a chalet project in the Alps.
I'm having trouble with getting a CLEAN, "grain-free" image.


Why can't I get a clean result?

Do you think it's due to the HDRI image?
Or to the many lightsources? (circled in red in the 2nd image)
Or to my Kernel settings ? (3rd image)

Any help/comment would be much appreciated, thanks in advance.


Madcoo


- Initial pic is 2048px wide (resized to 1600px)
- PMC
- 16000 samples
- 2hrs30mns with 2xGTX680

[badmilk69]

Try some caustic blur!, and yes small emitters cause a lot of noise.

[Seekerfinder]

Hi Madcoo,
Someone recently suggested Neatimage (http://www.neatimage.com/index.html) to get rid of some noise in post. Your image looks like it might benefit from that if you need a quick (and probably not perfect) solution).

Hope that helps.

Seeker

[madcoo]

@badmilk69 => thanks I'll try that - I didn't know what caustic blur was for

@seekerfinder => I hadn't come across that software before, I may give it a go - only thing is that the trial version only fully processes images that are 1024x1024 - images bigger than that only get partly processed, unless you buy the software

I'll try both solutions and see what's best, thanks ever so much guys !

[jbsfender]

Hi, I would remove the small lights and add these in Magic bullet looks as post to save on render time. Just a thought..

[madcoo]

Hi, I would remove the small lights and add these in Magic bullet looks as post to save on render time. Just a thought..

Thanks for your reply Jbsfender.
I also thought about it, but I wouldn't get the candles' orange reflections on the walls

Or maybe I could have done a quick render to see where the orange reflections were,
stopped the render,
then start another render without the lights and add the orange reflections in post-prod based on the first render...

[sdwhitton]

Hi there

What I tend to do with interiors is do a render with the ambient light only, hdri or sun etc

and then a separate render with a black environment and the emitters, direct lighting would probably do it

then comp the two in photoshop, with the emitter render added over, linear dodge/add or screen, or both!

the emitter render can usually be half the resolution of the main ambient render, if render times are an issue..

then you can easily play around with light levels, colour of lights (usually I add a warm photo filter and group it with the emitter render)

hope this helps..

[sdwhitton]

also, with your wood texture, I'd make that a glossy material, with a low reflection, just to 'embed' it a bit more, and make it look slightly waxy?

I think you need to UVunwrap this too, as the mapping looks a bit disjointed?

[madcoo]

Many thanks for the compositing tips sdwhitton, indeed that'll help me !

Indeed I need to make my UV-Unwrappings better but I'm on a tight deadline and I just got into 3DSMax (about 2 months ago now) and compared with Blender UV-Unwrapping is a nightmare.
(very disappointing for a 4000€-worth software!!!)
I'll have to have a look at some tutorials to master UV-unwrapping in Max.

[sdwhitton]

yes, UVunwrap is a bit of a faff - maybe it's only that timber box hovering in the middle of the image..

With the ambient render, you could, probably, just use Direct Lighting Diffuse, rather than PMC?