IBL and sampling in Clarisse / by Xuan Prada

Using IBLs with huge ranges for natural light (sun) is just great. They give you a very consistent lighting conditions and the behaviour of the shadows is fantastic.
But sampling those massive values can be a bit tricky sometimes. Your render will have a lot of noise and artifacts, and you will have to deal with tricks like creating cropped versions of the HDRIs or clampling values out of Nuke.

Fortunately in Clarisse we can deal with this issue quite easily.
Shading, lighting and anti-aliasing are completely independent in Clarisse. You can tweak on of them without affecting the other ones saving a lot of rendering time. In many renderers shading sampling is multiplied by anti-aliasing sampling which force the users to tweak all the shaders in order to have decent render times.

  • We are going to start with this noisy scene.
  • The first thing you should do is changing the Interpolation Mode to 
    MipMapping     in the Map File of your HDRI.
  • Then we need to tweak the shading sampling.
  • Go to raytracer and activate previz mode. This will remove lighting 
    information from the scene. All the noise here comes from the shaders.
  • In this case we get a lot of noise from the sphere. Just go to the sphere's material and increase the reflection quality under sampling.
  • I increased the reflection quality to 10 and can't see any noise in the scene any more. 
  • Select again the raytracer and deactivate the previz mode. All the noise here is coming now from lighting.
  • Go to the gi monte carlo and disable affect diffuse. Doing this gi won't affect lighting. We have now only direct lighting here. If you see some noise just increase the sampling of our direct lights.
  • Go to the gi monte carlo and re-enable affect diffuse. Increase the quality until the noise disappears.
  • The render is noise free now but it still looks a bit low res, this is because of the anti-aliasing. Go to raytracer and increase the samples. Now the render looks just perfect.
  • Finally there is a global sampling setting that usually you won't have to play with. But just for your information, the shading oversampling set to 100% will multiply the shading rays by the anti-aliasing samples, like most of the render engines out there. This will help to refine the render but rendering times will increase quite a bit.
  • Now if you want to have quick and dirt results for look-dev or lighting just play with the image quality. You will not get pristine renders but they will be good enough for establishing looks.