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Re: Blue noise dithered Sobol

Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2020 4:54 pm
by juangea
I've been doing some tests, and while Dithering is not so visible without Scramble, it's very obvious with scramble.

In the following picture you will see the same scene, rendered in Cycles, with 200 samples, as you can see there is a difference in the perceptual noise level, specially in combination with scramble distance, but I think that the effect in general is much more visible than in the tests here, not sure why.
Comparison_Dithering.png
Regarding denoise, with Dithering the noise patters in theoretically more uniform, hence you won't find the artifacts you can find in standard sobol, like small islands of packed pixels with the same color that can lead to "clouds" with denoise, with dithering the denoise should be improved thanks to that, at least theoretically, and it's what I found in our tests in the past, but as you can see, scramble is doing something in that regards, not sure what and why.

Re: Blue noise dithered Sobol

Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2020 11:55 pm
by alpistinho
Thanks for the test.

As far as I understand, the method implemented in Cycles is described here: https://www.arnoldrenderer.com/research ... stract.pdf
This method degrades into white noise as the rendering goes on, so I assume that by 200 samples there would be not that much difference between using the blue noise.

About scrambling, that I assume is something called "Distance Scrambling", I have never investigated so I actually don't know what it is about.

Would you be able to repeat this test with less samples per pixel such as 1, 4, 8 and 16?

Re: Blue noise dithered Sobol

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2020 12:08 am
by juangea
Yes, ok, I’ll do that tomorrow 👍

Re: Blue noise dithered Sobol

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2020 10:56 am
by juangea
BTW keep in mind that I posted here an evolution of that method, this is the link:

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02 ... slides.pdf

Re: Blue noise dithered Sobol

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2020 11:49 am
by Sharlybg
juangea wrote: Thu Mar 19, 2020 10:56 am BTW keep in mind that I posted here an evolution of that method, this is the link:

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02 ... slides.pdf
Wow can't even imagine that kind of improvement with a noise distribution method.

Re: Blue noise dithered Sobol

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2020 1:01 pm
by Sharlybg
He it in the master ready for test ?

want to integrated theses improvements in my cycles vs luxcore test i'm working on.

Re: Blue noise dithered Sobol

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2020 2:26 pm
by alpistinho
juangea wrote: Thu Mar 19, 2020 10:56 am BTW keep in mind that I posted here an evolution of that method, this is the link:

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02 ... slides.pdf
This is only valid for animation rendering.
The counterpart for still rendering is the one I mentioned in the first post, using Owen scrambled Sobol points

Re: Blue noise dithered Sobol

Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2020 2:33 pm
by alpistinho
Sharlybg wrote: Thu Mar 19, 2020 1:01 pm He it in the master ready for test ?

want to integrated theses improvements in my cycles vs luxcore test i'm working on.
Definitely not, the code is a bunch of patches thrown together and it is not even rebased for 2.4

Re: Blue noise dithered Sobol

Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:39 pm
by alpistinho
Just to give an update, I haven't really been able to create something that:
  • Has blue-noise characteristics in screen space
  • Doesn't have a heavy correlation between dimensions
  • Doesn't need to generate an absurd amount of samples
The version using Owen scrambled Sobol samples works ok for the first 256 samples and then reverts to the current Sobol. The first 256 samples are also faster to generate
The PMJ02 using Cranley-patterson rotation with blue noise works fine, but doesn't seem to be a lot of improvement over the current Sobol
The PMJ02 using Cranley-patterson but inside each stratum looks "bluer" but has heavy correlation between pixels.
Using PMJ02 but spreading the samples in the screen instead of using a sequence for each pixel looks good in the first pass, but I haven't found a way to make it good between the first and until all samples have been consumed.

Re: Blue noise dithered Sobol

Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2020 9:54 pm
by juangea
Sorry for not having done the tests yet, I’m having some busy days at home, I’ll do them ASAP