Extremely bright pixels in the rendered image cause the denoising algorithm
to produce extremely noticable artifacts. Therefore, a heuristic is needed
to exclude these pixels from the filtering process.
The new approach calculates the 75% percentile of the 5x5 neighborhood of
each pixel and flags the pixel if it is more than twice as bright.
During the reconstruction process, flagged pixels are skipped. Therefore,
they don't cause any problems for neighboring pixels, and the outlier pixels
themselves are replaced by a prediction of their actual value based on their
feature pass values and the neighboring pixels.
Therefore, the denoiser now also works as a smarter despeckling filter that
uses a more accurate prediction of the pixel instead of a simple average.
This can be used even if denoising isn't wanted by setting the denoising
radius to 1.
This commit contains the first part of the new Cycles denoising option,
which filters the resulting image using information gathered during rendering
to get rid of noise while preserving visual features as well as possible.
To use the option, enable it in the render layer options. The default settings
fit a wide range of scenes, but the user can tweak individual settings to
control the tradeoff between a noise-free image, image details, and calculation
time.
Note that the denoiser may still change in the future and that some features
are not implemented yet. The most important missing feature is animation
denoising, which uses information from multiple frames at once to produce a
flicker-free and smoother result. These features will be added in the future.
Finally, thanks to all the people who supported this project:
- Google (through the GSoC) and Theory Studios for sponsoring the development
- The authors of the papers I used for implementing the denoiser (more details
on them will be included in the technical docs)
- The other Cycles devs for feedback on the code, especially Sergey for
mentoring the GSoC project and Brecht for the code review!
- And of course the users who helped with testing, reported bugs and things
that could and/or should work better!
