My render is blurry and pixelated - solved

Hylas

Ok, I'm confused. I was testing some new HDRIs that I just bought.

There's nothing in the scene other than the figure, the HDRI, and a few additional lights. I also applied a bloom setting that I've used many times before. Nothing fancy going on here.

My render comes out all weird... attached below.

The outline of the figure is all pixelated, like there's no antialiasing.

Also, the figure is all blurry, almost as if there's an oil painting filter over it. You can see it especially in the face and hair.

DOF is not enabled. The render did 15000 iterations and reached 92% convergence, so that's not the problem, either.

Have you guys seen this effect before? What's going on here?

IceCrMn

Have you tried changing the Pixel Filter and the Pixel Filter Radius?

There's also texture compression Render Settings advanced tab Compression at the top.

Higher thresholds mean less compression.

I set mine to the max level each one would go to.

Just hold the up arrow button with the mouse until it stops going up :)

Should effectively disable all texture compression.

Also , to my understanding all denoisers work by blurring pixels.I keep all of that turned off. 

Including the firefly filter.

If I get fireflies, I'll try yo figure out where they are coming from before I turn it on out of desperation.

Hylas

Ah, found it. "Noise Degrain Filtering" - whatever that is - was set to 2 when it's usually 0.

I was loading a number of render settings in quick succession so one of them must have turned it on. How annoying.

Thanks for your input!

IceCrMn

You're welcome :)

 

Pennyfarman

IceCrMn said:

Have you tried changing the Pixel Filter and the Pixel Filter Radius?

There's also texture compression Render Settings advanced tab Compression at the top.

Higher thresholds mean less compression.

I set mine to the max level each one would go to.

Just hold the up arrow button with the mouse until it stops going up :)

Should effectively disable all texture compression.

Also , to my understanding all denoisers work by blurring pixels.I keep all of that turned off. 

Including the firefly filter.

If I get fireflies, I'll try yo figure out where they are coming from before I turn it on out of desperation.

Is there a reason why rendering quality changes from crisp to blurry/pixelated when I change the pixel dimension from 4000x4000 to 8000x4000? Nothing added to the scene and nothing has changed except the pixel size. The first two of Post Denoiser are checked. Everything else is set to default. The Noise filter is no longer available in 4.20 version, what's the alternative?

In another project, when I added a third figure to the scene, the rendering is blurred exactly like the above. Maintaining two figures gives a crisp rendering but adding third changes the quality. No changes in any of the settings. 

The only two things that are causing the blur are changing the pixel dimension or adding extra figures to the scene. So how to fix them? Thanks.

See attached. left is 4000x4000, then after changing only to 4000x8000 the result is on the right.

Richard Haseltine

odysseyowl said:

IceCrMn said:

Have you tried changing the Pixel Filter and the Pixel Filter Radius?

There's also texture compression Render Settings advanced tab Compression at the top.

Higher thresholds mean less compression.

I set mine to the max level each one would go to.

Just hold the up arrow button with the mouse until it stops going up :)

Should effectively disable all texture compression.

Also , to my understanding all denoisers work by blurring pixels.I keep all of that turned off. 

Including the firefly filter.

If I get fireflies, I'll try yo figure out where they are coming from before I turn it on out of desperation.

Is there a reason why rendering quality changes from crisp to blurry/pixelated when I change the pixel dimension from 4000x4000 to 8000x4000? Nothing added to the scene and nothing has changed except the pixel size. The first two of Post Denoiser are checked. Everything else is set to default. The Noise filter is no longer available in 4.20 version, what's the alternative?

In another project, when I added a third figure to the scene, the rendering is blurred exactly like the above. Maintaining two figures gives a crisp rendering but adding third changes the quality. No changes in any of the settings. 

The only two things that are causing the blur are changing the pixel dimension or adding extra figures to the scene. So how to fix them? Thanks.

I would suspect that the increased demands are dropping you to CPU, or at least significantly increasing the render time, and the render is terminating for time before reaching the desired convergence level.

Pennyfarman

Richard Haseltine said:

odysseyowl said:

IceCrMn said:

Have you tried changing the Pixel Filter and the Pixel Filter Radius?

There's also texture compression Render Settings advanced tab Compression at the top.

Higher thresholds mean less compression.

I set mine to the max level each one would go to.

Just hold the up arrow button with the mouse until it stops going up :)

Should effectively disable all texture compression.

Also , to my understanding all denoisers work by blurring pixels.I keep all of that turned off. 

Including the firefly filter.

If I get fireflies, I'll try yo figure out where they are coming from before I turn it on out of desperation.

Is there a reason why rendering quality changes from crisp to blurry/pixelated when I change the pixel dimension from 4000x4000 to 8000x4000? Nothing added to the scene and nothing has changed except the pixel size. The first two of Post Denoiser are checked. Everything else is set to default. The Noise filter is no longer available in 4.20 version, what's the alternative?

In another project, when I added a third figure to the scene, the rendering is blurred exactly like the above. Maintaining two figures gives a crisp rendering but adding third changes the quality. No changes in any of the settings. 

The only two things that are causing the blur are changing the pixel dimension or adding extra figures to the scene. So how to fix them? Thanks.

I would suspect that the increased demands are dropping you to CPU, or at least significantly increasing the render time, and the render is terminating for time before reaching the desired convergence level

This crisp render had Max Sample set to 300. I even tried bump up to 5,000 after changing the pixel dimension. The render is still blurry. And I tried let it go until desired convergence level is completed, still blurry. What settings would you suggest? 

Richard Haseltine

Is it stopping for convergence or for time (two hours is the default)? Help>Troubleshooting>View Log File after rendering should give information.

Pennyfarman

Richard Haseltine said:

Is it stopping for convergence or for time (two hours is the default)? Help>Troubleshooting>View Log File after rendering should give information.

Please refer to the attached. In the first left, the final decent rendering before upgrading from 4.16 to 4.20. The quality is no longer the same after 4.20. Yes, I've completed my two-hour rendering. Even after doubling the time and the number of samples, the final right image always produced the same results. In an effort to achieve better outcomes than the second, I changed the lighting on third and last. I opened the same file on my second computer with freshly installed Windows 10 with Daz Studio 4.20, however the quality isn't as great as the 4.16 from 2019 version. How would you account for the discrepancies?

testing2021

Same here. All renders end up low quality.