Rendering issue with Denoiser

aadarsh.satpute

Hi guys Can someone help me explains why my scenes are looking so cartoony smooth instead. i am not sure but few weeks earlier I get renders like 1st image and now my renders looks like 2nd image. I prefer the 1st one because it gives more details. but the 2nd one just take all the details away. While both have similar settings and both have Denoiser applied.

The one with the orange you may be able to see the skin texture but one with the grey has smooth skin texture and her hand.

Dartanbeck

It's a trade-off. Sometimes we can get away using the post-smoothing to keep render times lower, but at the risk of losing some of the fine details. We can work with the smoothing radius (default 1.5). Lowering it can bring back some of the finer details but possibly also so noise.

Of course the cure for this, whether using smoothing or not, is to let it render longer.

Dartanbeck

Sometimes. leaving the radius at its default and just adding more iterations will allow some of those fine details to come back.

aadarsh.satpute

Are we talking about gaussian filter radius? Iterations are already at 2000 which has been working fine. And post denoiser starts around 1850. I will give the filter radius a try

crosswind

As long as you turn on Denoiser, you'll loose "details"... As Dartanbeck says, this trade-off cannot be avoidable as long as Denoiser is there. To me, there's almost no skin detail in both of renders other than "blurry". Even if you set 1998 as Post Denoiser Start Iteration, Denoiser will still make your render blurry...

Try to optimize the lighting pattern in the scene first before using Denoiser... and try to avoid using denoiser if you wanna keep details. There're quite a few ways to eliminate / reduce "grainy noise" ... 

Beside, to keep the render necessarily sharp, may set Pixel Filter to "mitchell", Pixel Filter Radius 0.8 ~ 1.0.