Hello!
I'd say the prologue to this post is:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,26259.0.html(To summarise, the discussion was figuring out the value of a denoiser in Terragen)
So for this lil' experiment, I've been using
https://github.com/DeclanRussell/IntelOIDenoiserSet up a simple scene and ran a render - I've intentionally made it SUPER noisy so that any results are easy to spot
Ran this through the denoiser and got this:
Pretty much no difference... Boo!
So why is this not working?
My hypothesis here is that Terragen's internal rendering is attempting to reduce the noise by
slightly blurring each sample - potentially from the "Pixel reconstruction filter"? While this is a good feature, the effect it has is that noise is softened over the image to minimize the jiggidyness... These softened areas are interpreted by the denoiser as "noiseless", since there's an amount of coherence between each pixel?
So to test whether this was the case, I made the render
even worse. Anti-aliasing is set to 1, and I've switched from "Standard Renderer" to "Path tracer" so that my render has none of the filtering applied. The result is a mess
Note how every single pixel's noise is completely independent to any of its neighbors:
Since the denoiser registers it as "true" noise, it should now process the image properly.
Boom!!!
Okay yeah, it's ugly as hell, BUT what I'm proposing is that if Terragen included a "None" pixel reconstruction filter then we'll be able to push the noisy renders to a higher quality - which can then correctly be processed by a denoiser?
That's just how I imagine this would work anyway
Thanks for reading, open to thoughts and opinions!