We always strive to offer complete support for all the functionality of the 3D packages we support on our render farm. So we upgraded our systems to include the new features added by the latest release of Modo – the NVIDIA® OptiX™ denoiser (introduced in Modo version 12.2). The denoiser is GPU-based and, on our infrastructure, it runs on specially-configured servers that are also equipped with high-performance dual Xeon E5-series CPUs.
You can see below some tests made with the denoiser in a simple scene from Modo’s samples. There were three renders: one with the default quality settings of the scene, one with low-quality settings and the third with the same low-quality settings, plus the denoise step. All the renders were made at 2220 x 1440 px.
Room (Modo sample files), default render settings
Low quality / denoised image (hover to see the differences):
The differences in render times are quite significant. However, even in this relatively simple scene, the denoise step caused some details to be blurred out. And it wasn’t able to totally compensate for the low-quality samples in some areas of the image.
You can see the full images by following the links below:
Full render, original quality settings
Full render, low quality
Full render, low quality with denoise
Using the denoiser can cut the render times significantly. And this comes with a significant reduction in rendering costs, too. The cost for rendering the images above on our farm, with the standard on-demand rates, were $0.51 (or 0.45 EUR) for the standard version and $0.07 (or 0.06 EUR) for the low quality and denoised version.
It’s no magic bullet though, and it has its share of issues, particularly with scenes losing details after the denoise step. This means it’s up to you to judge what is the cost/benefit ratio for using it, and the decision will most likely vary from project to project. We’re just here to offer you all the possible tools so you can choose.
