Glossy Reflections Noise Issues

Posted by on Sep 28, 2010 in Twinklebox | No Comments

I’ve been having some issues with noise artifacts in my renders. I’m pretty sure it’s being caused by mental ray glossy material settings. I’ve got some pretty high intensity values on the lights in the scene and am using photographic exposure control to pull the brightness down and achieve the right kind of contrast I’m looking for. Okay, I’ve read a number of articles (this was useful) that suggest I’m not the only one experiencing the problem but the workaround suggestions don’t seem to be working very well.

Here’s a couple of renders to explain what settings I’m using.  (click enlarge)

So by increasing the anti-aliasing settings to 1 min 16 max and ithe glossy reflections precision to 5 the artifacts are almost gone but not quite. When animated the noise is far more obvious so to eliminate the noise I will probably have to increase these settings again and be left with a scene that is unrenderable due to the huge render times involved. I’m not sure if there is something that I’m missing that will help fix this so if you know anything then please share it.

I have spent many hours monkeying with the sampling filters, lights, materials, spatial contrast, exposure values, and so on and found no real solution. I can quite easily create a non mental ray material but I’m really liking the overall feel of the blurry reflections that I can’t really achieve without using a different render engine. Maybe I’m just being pedantic.

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