Noise Free?

What does the phrase "Noise Free" mean when speaking about rendering?
Ira

 

Search on Google turns up a lot of hits discussing "noise free
rendering".

Bo

 

Go to www.robrodriguez.com and click of the photo real challenge link.
View the images there. You'll notice some look grainy and some don't.
The grain is considered "noise".

 

Some rendering engines (like Maxwell) work by modelling the path of
photons landing on a sensor a bit like a digital camera operates.
The images sort of start out like looking a pointilist painting and
over many iterations refine/clear up toward a photo. The incomplete
image look grainy or noisy.
I don't know how it is for Maxwell but for Indigo which is similar by
50 mutations per pixel the image is quite recognisable, by 500 is
getting reasonably ok but you would not be too happy with it as is, and
by maybe 1000 is getting pretty impressive but there is still a little
noise evident.
You can stop rendering anytime you wish and if you like artificially
blend the noise with other software just as you might sharpen or adjust
the hue, saturation etc. in Photoshop.
For really high quality stuff you need to let it run for may be 5000
mutations.
The disadvantage of this type of renderer is that although realistic it
relies on sheer computational power to get a clean result whereas other
types will give you a clean result but less realistic picture straight
off.
Really I think you need to have 4 ,8 processors working on it and let
it run for a decent amount of time to do justice to its potential.
At the moment people probably give up too early just for the sake of
getting the job done in a fair amount of time.You can usually pick a
Maxwell render from the bunch because of the residual noise.
HTH

 

In my render I used DOF too, but tried to mimic a product shoot with
the camera at f16. This way most of the objects are clear and the
background is out of focus. Just as if we would show our work to our
customer... and our work is not to make renders but to design products.
My job is satisfying if the customer doesn't say a thing about the
render but has comments about the product.
-Marc