Noise Free?

Search on Google turns up a lot of hits discussing "noise free rendering".

Bo

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote:

Easiest analogy is to compare noise to the grain in a traditional photograph or the grain in a digital picture.

In Maxwell it creates a rendering by calculating the electromagnetic energy ( I think) pixel by pixel by going around and around and around..... so the image becomes progressively noise free over time. You can stop the render when you reach the limit of your patience, but built into maxwell , is the ability to restart a render and carry on . But the laws of diminishing return are involved.

There are programmes like Neat Image

that can clear up this noise and I use it for both my Maxwell stuff, as well as ordinary digital pictures.

Jonathan

Go to

and click of the photo real challenge link. View the images there. You'll notice some look grainy and some don't. The grain is considered "noise".

snipped-for-privacy@SPAMuko2.co.uk wrote:

Grain - not to be confused with blur. The Maxwell images all have a Depth of Field Blur - mine more than most - I must say for me intentionally, as I wanted that close up photography look.

The PW and Vray are crisp acrross the depth of the picture - too crisp for my liking which perhaps leads to the Moire patterns occuring on the staples that should not be there.

Jonathan

Some rendering engines (like Maxwell) work by modelling the path of photons landing on a sensor a bit like a digital camera operates. The images sort of start out like looking a pointilist painting and over many iterations refine/clear up toward a photo. The incomplete image look grainy or noisy. I don't know how it is for Maxwell but for Indigo which is similar by

50 mutations per pixel the image is quite recognisable, by 500 is getting reasonably ok but you would not be too happy with it as is, and by maybe 1000 is getting pretty impressive but there is still a little noise evident. You can stop rendering anytime you wish and if you like artificially blend the noise with other software just as you might sharpen or adjust the hue, saturation etc. in Photoshop. For really high quality stuff you need to let it run for may be 5000 mutations. The disadvantage of this type of renderer is that although realistic it relies on sheer computational power to get a clean result whereas other types will give you a clean result but less realistic picture straight off. Really I think you need to have 4 ,8 processors working on it and let it run for a decent amount of time to do justice to its potential. At the moment people probably give up too early just for the sake of getting the job done in a fair amount of time.You can usually pick a Maxwell render from the bunch because of the residual noise. HTH

In my render I used DOF too, but tried to mimic a product shoot with the camera at f16. This way most of the objects are clear and the background is out of focus. Just as if we would show our work to our customer... and our work is not to make renders but to design products. My job is satisfying if the customer doesn't say a thing about the render but has comments about the product.

-Marc