Heavy depth of field noise levels - I don't get it

[racoonart]

I don't fully understand why the bucket render has a limit of 10 adaptive passes? is the idea that this should be enough based on the threshold?  because so far when rendering fullsize 4-5K using a threshold at 0.1 it does a worse job than progressive actually, when NOT using Depth of field...

Bucket rendering is working fine, it's just a little basic at the moment.

Bucket rendering is working this way:
"Initial samples" are the number of passes (think of passes like in progressive mode) that are made for each pixel no-matter-what. After that each pixel in the image will be compared to it's neighbors and the "adaptive thres." condition determines how much contrast between those pixels is allowed. If the comparison fits the condition the pixel is considered to be sufficiently sampled. If, however, the condition is not met, then the next round of passes is started. The next pass is now rendered with 4 times as much samples as the pass before (if your initial samples parameter was set to e.g. 3, the next pass will be 4*3 and the next one 4 times as much as this one etc.). This will be done as many times as the "passes" setting is allowing the renderer to do.
Be aware that very low initial samples settings (1 or 2) may actually make things worse. If - by chance - the initial pass is producing a low contrast solution in some pixel areas it may not be evaluated ever after - thus potentially producing problematic spots. I'd recommend to go for 3 initial samples in most cases (depends on your GI and Light samples multipliers of course).

If you make a quick calculation in your head it should be clear why there is no need for more than 10 passes (if you reach 10 there is something wrong anyways).

[snakebox]

I very quickly got to 10 passes by using 3 initial passes and 10 adaptive... which is why I am confused.

[romullus]

Maybe it's because you rised adaptive treshold too much and renderer do not increase samples anymore.

[racoonart]

Ah, i did not notice the threshold you set. 0.1 means you allow pixels to differentiate about a value of RGB 25 25 25 before being considered to be refined! So romullus is probably right, your last 7 or 8 passes are most likely just skipped (almost) entirely.

[juang3d]

Threshold is ok at default, 0,03, you can increase it a bit if you want to accelerate the render, but I never go over 0,04

Cheers.

[Stan_But]

Yep
Adaptive threshold better hold minimal

to juang3d
I forgot that progressive mode now not have the access to tweak its adaptiveness. Maybe it is still in the functions
I agree that Bucket mode may be better now again.
But GI/AA 16 for heavy DOF... ))
Try it with 16 and 4 and compare

[Chakib]

Can't wait till progressive engine gets adaptivity too. I dislike buckets to much to choose it over progressive just for adaptivity.

+1 it would be great to see progressive with a quality adaptivity.

[juang3d]

I understand headoff, but what do you do if you have a lot of indirect lighting? If you set the AA/GI balance to 4 you'll be suffering a lot of GI noise, so for me the perfect balance lies around 16, of course if I don't have DOF i like to sacrifice a bit of AA and put it to 24 or so, but I understand that under some situations, like heavy DOF in exterior for example, using 4 could be better.

Cheers!