2024
 

Removing Noise Workflow

WIP
Last modified: 17 December 2024

Noise is an inevitable and unwanted result of rendering 3D images. Unless your scene is extremely simple it is likely that you will have some. LightWave's buffer view enables you to track down exactly where this noise is coming from before you launch your scene render.

new to 2020 Updated for LightWave 2020. We're all familiar with upping the Antialiasing samples in order to create a noise-free scene, but some noise can't easily be reduced this way - at least, not in a timely fashion. Adding samples to the wrong areas to improve renders will make them slower and not improve the quality. Working through this checklist will show you better where to concentrate your efforts.

Download icon Flowchart scene

This example scene is enclosed. Click on the box icon to retrieve it.

To exaggerate the effects of this workflow we have set our base values very low. Our scene has:

  • Depth of field with the F-Stop set to an unrealistic 0.8

  • Minimum and Maximum Samples at 1

  • Reflection Samples at 1

  • Refraction Samples at 1

  • Subsurface Scattering Samples at 1

  • Brute Force GI at 1 Ray

  • Light samples at 1

These all combine to give a render that looks like

noise-start.png

When trying to find the problem with this scene, we can check how the Alpha looks to see if it's purely an anti-aliasing problem.