noisy area lights

# 1 04-04-2012 , 12:08 PM

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I'm having trouble with the area lights in a scene causing noise -- it's still in the early stages but all the other lights/shadows are pretty smooth. even cranking up samples, photons, radius', final gather's on etc.
I'm upping every parameter I can think of and all's that's happening is the render time is increasing...

I'm not too fussed about the weird shapes and angles that're created here; until I sort this noise out there's no point in continuing.

user added image

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# 2 04-04-2012 , 06:31 PM

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Is it Vray or Mr?
I think its samlping problem. In vray i would turn up the sampling subdivs on the light & the adaptive DMC threshold too on the Vray Tab

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# 3 04-04-2012 , 06:53 PM

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Try increasing the high samples on the area light under the Mr section.

- Genny
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# 4 05-04-2012 , 11:55 AM

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It's MR. I've had a quick go but upping the samples I think you mean don't look to have done anything... no improvement anyway.

I understand area lights had to created differently for mr in earlier versions of maya... is this still the case?

here's a few shots of some of the settings I have...

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# 5 05-04-2012 , 06:37 PM

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If you can post the scene or email it to me, I'll take a look. Better than taking shots in the dark.

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# 6 05-04-2012 , 06:50 PM

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Playing with photons ? Painful part of lighting. Try to avoid it user added image

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# 7 05-04-2012 , 07:33 PM

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Holy crap! Accuracy of 1000?!

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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# 8 06-04-2012 , 06:04 AM

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1) maybe try these values for the lightShape: 40/1/8. using a high sample limit of more than 1 or 2 most often makes no sense in my opinion in terms of quality/performance. but make sure to up the low samples to at least 4 or more.

2) you didn´t turn on FG. all the samples are kind of "RAW" in this rendering, means there happens no interpolation through final gathering. unless you crank up photons/areaLight samples to ridiculous high values you won´t get smooth results. for testing try FG settings: Accuracy 50 and point density 0,1.

everything starts and ends in the right place at the right time.

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# 9 06-04-2012 , 09:38 AM

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thanks for all the advice - I'm trying it now. I get myself into a robble with these things because it doesn't seem to be any intuitive logic behind any of these settings. I don't really understand why I'm altering any of them; I'm just doing so because my uni tutor did similar. =\