Excessive noise/fireflies with ComplexFresnel

[Rimas]

Hi!

I've noticed quite a few people use Siger's Complex Fresnel in their work but I keep having problems with it :/

My current problem is that the rendered image with abundant use of the plugin causes an excessive amount of fireflies all over the scene!

Here's the image without any denoising after 17 hours of rendering on an i7-5960X!
http://www.clikcreations.co.uk/corona/cf/Bathroom_Noisy.jpg
Take a look at the metal bits, the candles, the side of the bathtub, toilet roll holder...unusable!

Fireflies all over the place...

If I disable the complex fresnel map and do thins manually (set the IOR back from 999 to 25 instead of using the map as intended) - the problem goes away completely. Comparison image HERE:
http://www.clikcreations.co.uk/corona/cf/Bathroom_noCF.jpg
Just quick patch renders here and there, not long at all, while the fireflies caused by the plugin don't go away pretty much at all...

I used to have black pixels all over my metals some time ago, but I traced it back to the plugin f-king up after a Corona update. So I updated the plugin and for some reason it worked out fine.
Now I'm running Corona 1.5.2 and the plugin version 1.0.6 (I'd expect most people to use that instead of 1.0.7 that is now available because it only came out a few days ago to support MAX 2018, as it says in the changelog). Does anyone else have this problem or is it something I did wrong? Should I just give up on the plugin altogether?

Thanks!

[pokoy]

I'd definitely contact the creator of the maps and share your results with him, I guess he'll be able to figure out what's wrong and iron out the issue with Corona's dev team.

[agentdark45]

Interesting, I'll have to do some testing myself as I heavily make use of the plugin.

[Siger]

I did a quick test. Very basic blurry chrome material with ComplexFresnel on shaderball. Max 2018, Corona 1.6 RC5, ComplexFresnel 1.0.7, denoising = false, passes = 30 - no fireflies issues. I do not have time to test on more complex scenes, but maybe later I do.

[Rimas]

I'm on MAX 2016 if that helps. Not sure what to do here. I'll try to reinstall the plugin, see if that helps at all. Really weird, hadn't come across that. Must have f*cked up somewhere, perhaps when I installed Corona 1.6 RC1/2 and then back to 1.5.2 (due to instability) because I surely hadn't noticed anything like that excessive firefly noise before. Will share more one I test it out.

[maru]

I did some tests and was not able to reproduce the issue. The amount of noise and rendering speed is almost the same with ComplexFresnel on and off, and there are no persistent fireflies.
I would advise to make sure to use the latest version: https://www.sigershop.eu/free-3ds-max-plugins/
In case of any reproducible problems, please send a specific scene to us (support@corona-renderer.com), and we would also notify the plugin developer.