has anyone had consistent success denoising multiple AOVs with imagers?

[Anonymous]

Sadly, the recent (today) update to MaxtoA did not fix this issue at all.

Using imagers, I can easily denoise a render (either Noice or Optix) but I cannot reliably do it for multiple AOVs. I chain the imagers together and it's totally unpredictable as to whether the denoised layers will be in the render, or not.

Often I'll add a denoise imager on, say, diffuse and add the output suffix -denoised, and end up with something like coat_denoise. totally different layer.

Arnold....get your act together. a few versions ago, at least we had a switch in our AOV dialog that let us denoise individual layers with Optix....and it worked. making denoisers imagers doesn't work at all.

[CiroCardoso3v]

I usually use a command line to denoise them with Noice and a variance AOV.

[Stephen.Blair]

I'm not sure what you mean by chained imagers.

I'm testing with one Optix denoiser imager, and I use the layer selection. For example RGBA or coat to denoise those two AOVs. Or * to denoise all AOVs.

[Anonymous]

@Stephen Blair

well, you REALLY helped clear one thing up. I had been applying a denoising imager PER AOV. So one for diffuse, and one for specular, as an example. This creates a chain of imagers as viewed in the material slate editor.

This is wrong.

As you pointed out, one denoise imager, and enter something like RGBA or coat and then both layers get the treatment.

However, I am still getting a similar "breakdown of communication" between the renderview and my actual render. I feel like it works the first time, but then if I delete the imager and create a new one (perhaps delete the Optix and create a Noice) I get an unpredictable result. Meaning, either the denoising layer will usually be missing from the render itself.

Sometimes, I'm still unable to get a denoised layer in my render if I only want one layer denoised.

Here is an example. This is my render view

and here is the render as viewed in DJV viewer

So that's really the problem I'm having. It seems a bit unpredictable when I get the correct denoised layers out in my render. admittedly, it seems to always be correct in my renderview, but the final render is sometimes lacking layers....or sometimes if I don't insert a Output suffix, the layer will be denoised in my renderview...but not in my render.

[Anonymous]

@Stephen Blair

thank you for your help with denoising AOVs. I am now getting the command prompt-Noice solution working...one question, is there a way in the command prompt code to denoise an entire sequence/animation, and not just a single frame/image?

[Stephen.Blair]

We have a number of tickets related to this, and fixes will be available in future updates. They weren't ready for the last update. In the meantime, I will try to build a repro scene that I can use for testing.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Stephen. As you can probably discern from my posts, I've done a great deal of experimentation with this.

One thing to watch out for is that often if you make a new scene, create and AOV list and add a denoiser to those AOV's, the first render will contain the denoised AOV's....but after "jiggling" the scene (moving the camera a touch, changing which AOV gets the denoise, really ANY change) and re-render, the denoised layers are no longer there.

My point is that testing is difficult and inconsistent.

Thank you again for the response.

[Stephen.Blair]

Well, it wasn't hard to repro and with my scene I never got the "_denoising" AOVs. So it was consistent.

And I was able to verify that an existing bug ticket did match up to this problem. So a future update will have the fix.