E-Cycles now with a temporally stable denoiser
TheMysteryIsThePoint
Posts: 3,306
I think that if this works well, It'd be reason enough to pay for E-Cycles. The flickering one gets when using a denoiser for animation is often unacceptable.
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Comments
I remember watching a video by Blender Guru and he showed a denoiser called Neat Video. I got the feeling it was a popular denoiser for animation.
I hadn't heard of that tool. It looks pretty good, but it has no Blender integration. I do use DaVinci Resolve and on Linux no less, but I think I'd want to see how the denoising turned out long before that stage...
Yeah, the shadow flicker drives me nuts in my animations.
Not sure if my answer OT but In my old day when I did lots animation work using VUE and MAX , FLICKERING mostly caused by same sharpness quality in each frame/image sequence . The only solution I found was using Camera Motion Blur or apply motion blur in post
I love Neat Video! Totally works like a charm. I remember one time I was working as a post PA on a network show for a few weeks while the regular guy was on something else and they had some really grainy video that they were trying to fix. I luckily overheard the problem and said to send it to me and I fixed it right up. When my time was up on the show, they called me once or twice afterwards randomly to see if they could send me footage to fix again lol. I don't know how well it would work for animations, but it's definitely worth a shot!
I've used Topaz Labs's image denoiser to good effect, but for some reason they have a separate tool for video. I haven't tried it, but I wonder if E-Cycles having access to more info from all the render passes is a significant advantage that makes a difference.
The last time I tried it, E-Cycles didn't work very well on multi-GPU and it was slower on my rig than stock, so I haven't payed much attention to E-Cycles. I don't really understand the upgrade terms and if I have the right to the new stuff, but I'll try it out and report back, if I do.
The denoiser in E-cycles is based on the specific noise pattern created by cycles. It is more effective at eliminating those specific noise patterns than a video denoiser like Neat Video which is meant for denoising footage from traditional camera capture.
That being said I highly recommend you try K-Cycles instead of E-Cycles. It's easier to use, faster and the newest 3.0 branch has the option to export the denoise data as a sepeperate pass for you to composite as you wish afterwards. As well as separate passes for things like bloom, lens flare and custom bokeh etc. Also it has the option of its own denoiser vs Optix which looks very nice even on volumetrics.
Great information, thank you.
Even Cycles X with OpenImage denoising is much better than I remember Cycles being.
Never trust a comparison chart you didn't fake yourself :)
Nah just jokin, Eric and Mathieu do both a good job, frankly I can't say anything negative about K-C, but I'm using E-C Pro (not the 1 USD version) successfully for several years now and it easy to use, just a single click. Sure you can deeply dig into params, and if there any special questions, you'll get fast and precise help by Mathieu. Btw, I would really like to know which version of E-C and K-C you are using for an in depth comparison. The mentioned goodies in K-C are really nice, but already realized by other addons like uber-compositor since 2.8.
That's an important point you raise: Mathieu offers fast and in-depth support, and is clearly greatly engaged in the success of E-Cycles. He'll take the time to really talk to you in more detail than you needed,as he did with me over my concerns of the increased power draw of my just-barely-sufficient power supply of my setup and my house's wiring. Not to imply that K-Cycles's creator would not as well, just that Mathieu did.
I had ok comms with the E-Cycles creator. But over all to me K-Cycles has run better, faster and looks nicer. And there is a very active Discord server for K-Cycles for any questions. Honestly it's been a life saver on my current project. My render times on my 2080ti now are similar to what I had heard people were getting from their 3090s last year.
Just my personal anecdotal experiences.
Interesting thanks. Wanted to find out how both are acting, if they're on par or not, so I bought K-Cycles as well. Have tested both Cycles X 3.0 Alpha versions (E-Cycles_3.0_alpha_20210916_win_rtx(Optix), K-CyclesX_3.00_2021_alpha_v20211008a_win_rtx) with my 3080Mobile/16GB, they're producing nearly the same speed with the same file, but tbh I need more testing / optimizing with both, and will wait till Blender 3.0 has reached at least bcon3. Will test 2.93 as well.
To have a Discord channel is great, and what I really like is that Eric has added the links to the current source of his fork. Interesting because I also own a license of the VFXGrace.com 3D ParticleBrush (an amazing hairbrush system) including the source. Will see if both can be merged into one fork :)
@SDev
Thank you for that off-topic reference! With all the woes I have with my protagonist's curly hair, I have no idea how I could have missed 3D ParticleBrush. Can you talk a bit about your experiences with it? Maybe in a different thread?
Frankly I haven't played that much with this fork to give you a qualified answer, due to RL there was nearly no time, most of my spare time was spent for my hardsurface models in blender :)
Fair enough. Some really interesting stuff on their site. I think I'll try a few. Thanks for the find; I had not come across this site before.
I'm still using 2.93 and am quite interested in better denoising. Here I tried OptiX instead of the usual NLM with Cycles and it seems better than other attempts.
Edit - If you do try 3.0.0 Alpha, DO NOT SAVE YOUR SCENE!
I think you should definitely at least give 3.0.0 alpha a try, then. I haven't done a side-by-side comparison, but it just seems like Cycles X is much better out of the box with Open Image Denoise.
I went back and did a side-by-side test and, actually, both versions have less fireflies than I remember. It must be thn scene. Sorry for misleading you. Were you using Open Image Denoising, though?
If you have problems to open a 3.00 file in a previous version, just check against the compress flag - best is to deactivate compression, and then save the file again. There were some changes in the zstd compression algorithms lately.
I'm sure that's an issue as well, but I had an armature modifier stop working trying to open a 3.0.0 blend file in 2.93.
E cycles is just using blender 3.0 features and nothing else. the better open Image denoiser is from Intel and blender 3.0 is updating to version 1.4, which e-cycles has already done. that is the only difference.
It would be way smarter if people support Blender instead of "stupid" branches.
And it would be awesome if DAZ would support OIDN 1.4+ it would reduce render times up to 4x at the same image quality. And its open source so it is just up to DAZ to implement it!
One does not exclude the other. :)
That argument never seems to work when hoping for Daz to do something though, does it? On my list of things that DS could benefit from that they don't have to develop, only integrate, OIDN isn't even in the top 5 :) My #1 is full blown USD, materials and all. Then I wouldn't need to care about the rest :)
I've been running several denoiser experiments on the Blender 3 alpha. Have been able to get ok results for a still, but not an animation yet.