What the ####? Square noise

[Cocateho]

Has anyone come across this before? It seems to either be connected to the reflective shader I have on the water or the ray tracing, but I can't seem to fix it completely, figured maybe someone on here may have seen this before, hopefully?

[Oshyan]

Likely your Reflection Softness is too high for the number of Samples you are using (samples are on the Quality tab of the Reflective Shader). The Softness value is very sensitive, small decimal values are best, and even with small values you often need very high sample settings (and thus long render times) to get good results. It's an issue we hope to improve on in the future with different rendering techniques and approaches.

- Oshyan

[Cocateho]

Thank you! At least that seems pretty simple, it does make sense because I set the softness fairly high,  I didn't realize that would require higher detail though. Good to know in the future!

[fleetwood]

 Softness is one of those sliders where in the middle setting is a bad idea.
This example had very similar blocky patches from setting softness incorrectly to around 0.5

[Oshyan]

Yes, the default for Softness and the total slider range should really be changed.

- Oshyan

[bobbystahr]

When I need it I start a 0.001 and go up by single digits. I tend to set Samples at 10-15 max for semi sane glass render times.

[Tangled-Universe]

Indeed Bobby,

A softness of 0.001 renders pretty good with 6-8 samples.
A softness of 0.005 needs 16 samples for sure.

It also depends a bit on the roughness of the reflecting surface (water) I suppose.
The smoother it is, the fewer samples you would need, but that's mostly my gut feeling on what's happening.

[DocCharly65]

Good to know this... I had similar trouble with my Saturn animation at first.

[Tangled-Universe]

It's always good to check reflection samples using crop renders, but don't forget(!!!) to increase the 'ray detail region padding' to make sure that the renderers explores more of the scene outside of the crop render area for surfaces to reflect.
(a value of 1 means 100% of the crop area extra in all directions)

[bobbystahr]

It's always good to check reflection samples using crop renders, but don't forget(!!!) to increase the 'ray detail region padding' to make sure that the renderers explores more of the scene outside of the crop render area for surfaces to reflect.
(a value of 1 means 100% of the crop area extra in all directions)

good tip, never thought of this...thanks