Altus (Innobright tech) denoising tests by Vlado @ chaosforum

[denisgo22]

Exist blur Artifacts on white lighting on the ceilling
and on highlights/
may be wrong Elements you used?
You use Standalone or version for Maya?
From 3d max I need Command Line for launch this application?
Please describe me a full work process.

[twcg]

Exist blur Artifacts on white lighting on the ceilling
and on highlights/
may be wrong Elements you used?
You use Standalone or version for Maya?
From 3d max I need Command Line for launch this application?
Please describe me a full work process.

yeah, there are artefacts, but the input images are reaaally noisy...
I do not know if these Elements are the best to use.
I am using the Altus Standalone with the command line..

in my case the command looks like this:

altus.exe -r 10 -i "text" -o "C:\InnoBright\Altus\bin\output" -b "C:\InnoBright\Altus\bin\input\b0_.exr" -b "C:\InnoBright\Altus\bin\input\b1_.exr" -a "C:\InnoBright\Altus\bin\input\b0_CShading_SourceColor.exr" -a "C:\InnoBright\Altus\bin\input\b1_CShading_SourceColor.exr" -n "C:\InnoBright\Altus\bin\input\b0_CGeometry_NormalsShading.exr" -n "C:\InnoBright\Altus\bin\input\b1_CGeometry_NormalsShading.exr" -v "C:\InnoBright\Altus\bin\input\b0_CShading_Shadows.exr" -v "C:\InnoBright\Altus\bin\input\b1_CShading_Shadows.exr" -g

[denisgo22]

thanks a lot!!!
I will also test this/
Thanks/

[Ondra]

Exist blur Artifacts on white lighting on the ceilling
and on highlights/
may be wrong Elements you used?

Or just limitation of the algorithm. These things are not all-powerful - they cannot manufacture new information not present in the image. They can only blur the image and hope for the best ;)

[Juraj]

Just did a small test:

Just 4 passes
GI/AA: 24
MSI: 10
You need to unlock the sampling pattern
Elemtents: Beauty, CGeometry_NormalsShading, CShading_SourceColor (Albedo?!), CShading_Shadows (VIS?!)
(Not 100% sure if these are the best passes for the AOVs)

Rendertime: 1:40 min per image
Filtering Time: 43Sec

Edit: tried to process a 4960x3508 Image, but there is not enough ram on my gtx 970 und the CPU-Mode does not work for me...

This look glorious for 4 fucking passes and first try.

I have some scenes, that look almost correct between 100-200 passes (which can be up to 10 hours on my dual-xeon !!), but even 1000+ passes (tried it...yes, few days), won't clear it completely. Prime candidate for adaptivity but even then it would take almost endless time and still be noisy I believe. This is the kind of thing that can push it further into clean look.

I don't believe artifacts will be too noticeable (or at all) if enough passes are done at high-enough (4k px +) resolution, which should still yield enough speed-up.

[Ondra]

yes, it looks good. I am quite curious how it will compare with our own adaptivity solution. I guess we will see in november ;)

[denisgo22]

adaptivity solution for Corona it's still better than third-party development
at least for economic reasons!!!
And whats with animations with 300 frames???
After rendering sequences your must render this second time???
+ Post process?

[Juraj]

What's up with this vs adaptivity ?

[Juraj]

I can imagine this eventually being perfect thing for frame-buffer integration. Even as odd as two different noise pattern renders is, that can be done inside at same time without any overhead using distributed rendering. But that can be internally automatized.

Animation can be batch processed you can probably already do it using some kind of soft like deadline/shotgun with some scripting skill. Although we don't know what kind of artifacts this brings up in animation, I presume it's quite doable if Disney has similar tech primarily animation oriented. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me. I mean it's in infancy, so why discount it in favour of something else ? Looks pretty damn promising to me even now.

Imho, adaptivity has potential to "speed" up renders perhaps by twice ? That's 50perc. savings cost for animation budget. This ? This can save up to 90perc. perc of budget if you compromise visual quality. Which many would gladly do for animation, where costs easily reach thousands of euros for few minutes of footage.
And I am not even talking about super cheap pre-viz. Even if this tool wouldn't be suitable for final output, for test renderings/animation, it would be god-send.

Also, adaptivity primarily helps with non-uniform noise distributed in scene (stuck noise). But what about simply heavy scenes with pretty uniform noise ? Those simply need the sampling done and nada. Noise reduction is pretty universal, renderer-agnostic need and wish of any user. There definitely is a place for tool like this.

I, look a lot to where this goes :- )

[Ondra]

I can imagine this eventually being perfect thing for frame-buffer integration. Even as odd as two different noise pattern renders is, that can be done inside at same time without any overhead using distributed rendering. But that can be internally automatized.

Our prototype has this indeed automated.


Generally: the hard part is the same in both cases - detecting where is the noise in the image. When you have a noise heatmap, next step is pretty trivial in both cases - either you throw more samples in the region, or you blur it more (yes, even the most advanced denoising basically just blurs the image with varying blur radius). This means that if one approach did not work in a particular scene, the other one will be unlikely to work too.

We have the filtering done, and now we are trying our luck with the adaptivity. We will probably release both in daily builds soon, but only the adaptivity will be turned on by default (or maybe always-on), because it is so much simpler to use. There are no reasons why not use it. Same is not true for filtering.

[Juraj]

[Adaptivity]There are no reasons why not use it. Same is not true for filtering.

Completely agree with both statements :- )

[denisgo22]

One Big Problem.
What with Post Process???
If your want to processing your image with Reflection/Refraction/Wire/Indirect illumination channels in Photoshop/Nuke/After/ and others softwares,
your need to get CLEAR CHANNELS for this, without noise/
What your will doing in this case???

[Noah45]

Exciting times. We are almost at a point where we can render 'reality' in the same time it took a Polaroid to develop in the 70's

[romullus]

We have the filtering done, and now we are trying our luck with the adaptivity. We will probably release both in daily builds soon, but only the adaptivity will be turned on by default (or maybe always-on), because it is so much simpler to use. There are no reasons why not use it. Same is not true for filtering.

Excuse me, i may be a bit slow, but what is that filtering you talking about?

[Ondra]

Excuse me, i may be a bit slow, but what is that filtering you talking about?

our internal prototype. Will be made public in a month or two