Why did we use the compositor for denoising?

[amannin]

Why did we use the compositor for denoising instead of any of the render denoisers? Is one better or faster than the other? Non-destructive? Personal preference?

[Jonathan Lampel]

Open Image Denoise gives the highest quality of the denoisers, but at the time of recording it was only available as a node and not listed in the render properties. Feel free to check that on instead! 

[amannin]

What about when compared with Optix, for those of us with newer nVidia GPUs? Also, what about animations, is one better than the other, or what’s the best method for that?

[Jonathan Lampel]

Optix is way faster and looks really good too – I think it’s a bit too dark at lower sample counts but the speed can certainly make up for that. At the moment none of the denoisers are temporally stable, so just go with whatever either looks best or is fastest depending on what you need. 

[Nathi Tappan]

I’m not entirely sure, but I believe for animation we can check the “Experimental” in the GPU setting for cycles, then click this button under the Advanced tab.

It randomizes the noise, which makes it less noticeable over 24fps or more.

But again, I’m not entirely sure this is correct. @spikeyxxx could probably let us know 🙂

[Nathi Tappan]

Oops… forgot to attach the screenshot.

[Martin Bergwerf]

Hi Nathalia @nathitappan ,

That is absolutely correct!

That clock icon changes the distribution of the Samples per frame, thus varying the noise pattern (a bit like how film grain changes per frame).

(It does not remove any noise, it is not a denoiser.)

[Omar Domenech]

I thought that clock was removed a couple of Blender versions ago. It was either there the whole time or it was put back in again. Cool.

[Martin Bergwerf]

I don’t think they ever removed it, Omar…they just hid it away under Advanced.

[Nathi Tappan]

Cool! I’m glad I had that right, I wasn’t sure if it was like a placebo effect to me, cause while not denoising it does feel like it make the noise on my animations a tad better (in fact, some noise is always wanted right? I add noise to my compositions in after effects pretty much on auto pilot at this point lol).

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