Hello, I'm Bob Duffy, Intel developer program manager
and Blender user.
In this video, I'm going to show you
a little bit about the Intel Open Image Denoise,
talk about how to use it in Blender so that CG artists,
game developers, and media developers
can make use of this technology to speed up ray tracing
and get quality results.
Before we get started, let's discuss denoising--
what it is, how it speeds up the time of ray tracing,
and how the Intel Open Imaged Denoise uses
advanced methods to increase the speed and quality of denoising.
Most modern 3D rendering engines use a form
of ray tracing called path tracing to create
beautifully realistic renders.
Path tracing works by mimicking light,
shooting virtual light rays from each pixel location in an image
to objects in a virtual scene.
If an object is translucent, then the ray
will pass and bend through the object to objects behind it.
Information on light, shadow, color, and surface properties
of each virtual object bounce along the path,
defines the color illuminant of the pixel.
Each light ray per pixel is called a sample.
The more samples you have per pixel,
the cleaner a render is, but longer it takes to render.
If your sample rays per pixel the grainier
or noisier a render looks but the faster
the rendering is done.
To get a pristine render, it may take thousands
of samples per pixel and even take hours per frame
to generate.
Denoising is a computer algorithm
that cleans up the noise when using
a lower sample per pixel count.
This can create beautifully clean renders
in a fraction of the time.
To date, many denoisers did a fair job,
but in areas of low light or textures,
denoisers often create unwelcome patterns in a final render.
The Intel open image denoise library,
part of the Intel One API Rendering Toolkit,
uses artificial intelligence to more intelligently denoise
a render.
And the results can be stunning.
The Intel Open Image Denoise library
is now part of Blender 2.81.
You can go to blender.org and download
the latest release of 2.81 or greater
to make use of this open source library from Intel.
This feature will improve renders for film, game cut
scenes, or game textures using fewer samples,
saving digital artists and developers a lot of time.
Welcome to this demo and tutorial
of using Intel Open Image Denoise in Blender.
For this demo, I am using Blender version 2.82.
I'm using that version to demonstrate
the improved rendering using the Albedo rendering layer.
I will demonstrate that later in this demo.
You're going to want to open up Blender and have
a scene that you create or that you've imported in using
the cycles rendering engine.
I suggest that a scene be used that has shadowed areas
that isn't perfectly well lit.
That's going to give you a better idea of the noise
because noisy areas are best shown in areas of shadow
or there's just not enough light.
To demonstrate this on an actual render,
I'm going to take my rendering samples all the way down to 32
samples.
Usually would do a render of hundreds or thousands
of samples in order to do a clean render.
So this seems counterintuitive.
Why are we going in the opposite direction?
One is to demonstrate this on video
and also just really demonstrate how fast of a render
you can create that will look clean with open image denoise.
So with that done, move over to the compositing tab.
This is where the denoise happens.
It doesn't happen in render.
It happens after the render is done.
To make use of it, make sure that nodes is selected
and you want to make sure that your render
layer and your composite node are connected by image.
Then over in your Properties panel,
in your Layer properties, find Denoising data
and turn that on.
So make sure that that is checked.
You will see that you'll have more
information available to your render layers.
This is important information to do denoise.
Then go to the add node, search for denoise, select it.
And this is the Intel Open Image Denoise in node form.
To get this to work, it's as simple as connecting it.
You connect the output of the image render
to the image input, same with the denoising
normal, and same with the albedo.
These layers are used to improve performance
and also to improve the quality of denoise.
I'm not going to--
usually you would connect this last little bit.
But I'm going to do that after the render
so that you can actually see it happening in work.
So I have my rendering scene.
I'm going to make sure I can see a lot of different noisy areas,
so areas of low light like the back of this box here
where these caustics are, I expect
those to render very noisy.
So I'm going to go ahead and F12 to render out and then
switch back over to compositing where I can view this.
And this is completing its render.
So this is exactly the noisy areas
that we're going to see cleaned up by the denoiser.
This kind of stuff is going to get cleaned up.
So that took 15 seconds to complete.
It's a short render because we have low samples per pixel.
So the last part to do is to go ahead and connect it.
I'm going to make sure that you can see an area of noise
as I connect it.
So I will connect it here, let go, and there it is.
That area [INAUDIBLE] is all cleaned up.
And let's look around the image.
So you can see that area here where it was all noisy,
all perfectly clean.
And that's all you need to do.
You just need to connect the nodes,
make sure that denoising data is on, and it's working.
As you do another render, this will work for you.
So every frame that you render or as you
move your camera around and create
another area of rendering, this will all work.
I'll go ahead and render this frame just to show you.
This is going to render noisy, but once the rendering is done,
compositing will take effect with the node.
And all this noisy area will get cleaned up.
And it's about done.
And there it is.
So that's all cleaned.
I also want to show you how well it
works with the albedo plugged in here.
So I'm going to disconnect this and then focus in
on this Intel logo here.
So as we zoom in, you know, it's a little bit
muddy, artifact-ey, pixilated.
Let me reconnect the Albedo.
We'll look at the Intel logo and see what happens.
There it is.
It's much cleaner.
It's much crisper.
And you'll notice across area here is like the Intel box.
That's super clean.
But area where we have normal information,
like the stack of cards, that normal information
is preserved.
The clean lines of the Intel logo, all preserved.
All the text areas well preserved.
We didn't, with the denoising, muddy those up or create
any underwater artifacts.
It's perfect and it's pristine.
That's all there is to it.
I would suggest playing around with it.
A couple of things you might want to do
is reduce the number of samples, find out
how low can you get the samples, how quick can you get a render
but still have it look good with denoising.
Another thing you might want to do is play with the lighting.
Dim the light down.
I mean, how dark can it get, you know?
How little information of light can be available
before you get-- denoising really doesn't do anything.
It doesn't make an effect.
And the other thing to really play around with
is the compositing itself.
Because it's done in the compositing layer,
you have access to all sorts of other things.
You could add in, I don't know, something like a color ramp
here.
So you could add a color ramp in between these image areas
here, where lets just say that the areas of darkness--
you want to make sure that that's denoised,
but not the areas of light.
And so you can mix up your denoising
so you denoise certain areas, but not everything.
It's up to you.
You're the artist.
You're crafting this.
And you have all the flexibility that you
want to apply denoising how you want
to apply it thanks to nodes and using it
in the compositing area.
So that's it.
That's all there is to the Intel Open Image Denoise in Blender.
To learn more about Blender 2.81, the Intel open.
image Denoise in other parts of the Intel oneAPI rendering
Toolkit, follow the links below.