Cycles denoiser

[romullus]

I just stumbled upon this picture with various denoisers being compared in Blender. At first glance it seemed nothing unusal, but then i noticed Cycles denoiser results. Some may say that they are much noisier than that of other (supposedly AI) denoisers in the chart, but to my eye, its output is much more pleasing, because it not simply smears details or creates halucinated artifacts, but rather merges pixel size noise into bigger blobs and makes it appear as more "photographic". Any day of the week i would choose this coarse noise over clinically clean, plastic output of AI denoisers. Would love to see something similar in Corona. What do you think?

[TomG]

Sounds very similar to what the new High Quality Filtering does in Corona before denoising - now the AI denoisers just need to learn how to work with it :) The Corona Denoiser already works with it though.

[romullus]

New filtering is definitely a step in the right direction, but it still pproduces to small, too regular CG looking noise. Not even close to what's can be seen in picture above, IMHO.

[maru]

To me it looks just like a non-denoising denoiser. :) But maybe I am wrong. I would have to see other examples in higher res.

[romullus]

I would say it turns shity looking noise into more pleasant noise. A noise converter :] Personally, i prefer such result over plastic output of AI denoisers. But that's probably just me.

[burnin]

Note:
Cycles denoiser is based on Adaptive Rendering based on Weighted Local Regression

[dgruwier]

Not sure if I'd pick OIDN over Cycles with those artifacts at very low sample counts, but I honestly just wouldn't pick ANY of them below the 64 samples version, and above that point OIDN clearly the best job by far in my eyes.

I think denoising should be something that cleans up the last trivial remnants of noise that would take ages to get rid of with raytracing, not something that lets you get away with broken renders in the first place. That might change with future developments, but for now I'd rather just sacrifice lighting and material complexity for less noise, rather than live with either artifacts or splotchy smeary noise.