I’ve seen some beautiful lamp renders on here, and I’m curious how many samples you guys are using. Here’s mine so far:
This is at 3,000 samples, and I’m really not satisfied with the amount of noise. I think I’ll play with the light sources a bit to see if I can make it any better. In the mean time, what strategies have you guys used to reduce noise and increase render quality?
Here it is at 10,000 samples, and I increased the resolution from 50% to 100% (1920*1080). The noise is much better, but it took about an hour to render.
What kind of settings have you guys been using?
Holy cow. That’s way too many samples. I only used 128. This is what it looks like:
One way to reduce that is by tuning this setting window below (note that the above image is NOT tuned with these settings–I found other ways around this, but I absolutely HAD to use these settings in the fluffy bunny section because it was a night scene and everything looked horrible otherwise). Try any combination of these. The refractive stuff should be tried first–I’m 99% sure that this is the cause of what you’re seeing. If that doesn’t work, then go for the indirect or direct clamp (up to you, but try indirect first with the refractive if refractives alone don’t cut it for you).
You really shouldn’t ever go beyond 1-2k samples. If you are/need to, then the only times this is true is… 1. you have a very high resolution image, 2. you have an extraordinary amount of light that you cannot compromise on (very, very rare!), and 3. you have detail that cannot be preserved by lowering samples. Light is not detail and shouldn’t be the reason for rendering at 10k samples.
Wow that is a big improvement! Here is what it looks like now with the settings you recommended, and down to 100 samples:
Thanks for taking the time to help!
Ah, there we go! Looks much better.
Happy to have helped 
and happier that you got the result you were looking for!
