Do you have a camera and microphones installed inside of my house?? Because I’ve encountered this problem few weeks ago and now you’re providing solution😳
That's an elegant solution. I haven't yet faced the original issue myself, but these kinds of lights are going to be core to upcoming Blender work. Thanks for sharing the information and the setup!
Hey! One idea I have is you can use light linking which was introduced in blender 3.3 which allows you to select specific collections in which your lights influence. I use it ALLLLL the time now.
Great tips! And I like your thought process. I'm always on the lookout for efficient workflows which includes both reducing render times without sacrificing quality and reducing the amount of time I spend fiddling around in post. This helps both of those issues.
Great explanation 👏👏👏 I do use the area light part but not the extra bulb/filament part (although often if the camera doesn't see the bulb in a light, I just delete the bulb, obviously depends on the lampshade and etc)
I like this solution! the only thing I found that worked was to denoise all the passes separately (just using the normal, not the denoising normal or denoising albedo (that takes super long if you're doing it for every pass, and it doesn't end up looking much different).
What if you used an area light behind the filament, used light linking to affect only the filament, so it looks like the light is coming from it, and then a point light to illuminate the scene ? I haven't tried this so not sure if it work would, but that's what came to mind first.
I tried it and am finding an issue with the poiny light passijg through the glass. After the light linking fix, my poiny lighy ks trapped inside the filament and is not exiting (I have similar scene but with a flashlight). As a quick fix if I turn off shadow ray visibility for my glass it kind of fixes the issue but it doesn't seem to a clean fix
This is super cool. I had this issue in a scene i had a bunch of string lights supposedly lighting the scene, and I dont think I ever really solved the issue. I might have to crack the scene open again and try your method. I'm not sure I understood the theory behind the light linking but thats on me to go learn that.
Do you need to have the emission set so high for the filament? Now that you are faking the lighting from it with the point lights would it not render cleaner/faster with emission set to just 1 or 10 at most? It would never occur to me to set it to 1000 in any situation due to noise issues. I often use lights to enhance emission effects in LEDs/buttons etc when doing product renders and have never seen much of a slow down on low values.
This is amazing. Reminds me of a trick used by Roger Deakins and his gaffers in real life to manage exposure on the higher range when practical bulbs in frame should actually light the scene. The would hide a high power bulb behind the lower one thus maintaining the highlights of the shot. Your purpose is different but similar.
In this specific case, you used a close-up shot. Would this kind of scenario have an impact on a typical scene where an entire room is shown with multiple light sources? My second question is related to render settings. So, from what I understood in the video, for still images, it’s perfectly fine to set Indirect Light to 0, and that value is increased only when working on animations? Another thing I noticed is that all Max Bounces are set to 32 (by the way, from your previous tutorials, I’ve also adopted these values as default for final renders). I assume you didn’t have volumetric objects in this scene, so could you explain why the Volume slot is also set to 32? If you don’t have fog or clouds, would setting Volume to 0 speed up render times? Thanks for the helpful tips. Cheers.
I would still probably use this in a full scene, especially if it was an animation that needed optimisation. If it was a still image, i'd probably render the entire room with the lamp and see how it turns out, if it is fine and render isn't taking too long i'd leave it. But I can very easily use this method going forward anyway, just to be safe. You enver know when the client will say "oh we want an animation of this now" Clamping Indirect will generally be fine with the denoiser for still images, unless you have an object casting quite a lot of noise/fireflies into the scene. It is quite scene dependant really, but most archviz scenes would be fine (unless lighting it from noisy objects like bulbs/weird glass etc) Ah yeah i have it 32 by default to get absolute maximum bounces. But it is definitely overkill, you can probably get away with half that, but my render time is still always manageable, in this scene for example the frames were about 10 seconds in the end so no complaints. If I'm doing animations and desperately need to save every second then I'll look more into it. I think it can increase render time if there is no volume and you tell it there is volume, I think it is then expecting it. But it never appears to introduce much more render time for it to be an issue. If I need a highly optimised scene I'd turn it off, but even then I rarely see much of a difference. Definitely need to do some tests for this!
Great stuff Kris! Soooo now I'm wondering if I go into the .blend files for all the iMeshh assets that I use for lighting and change them, or just do it as needed? I do a lot of interior shots that sometimes take too long...and maybe this is one reason. Thanks for the downloadable files! I'll be using them.
@@MrWoundedalien I'd definitely say it is scene dependant, I think in a lot of instances the fireflies/noise will probably be limited to the area around the lamp and for stills it would probably render and be denoised perfectly fine. Most Archviz scenes require plenty of samples to clear it up anyway. I think if the main scene is being illuminated by a visible bulb then it would probably require some tweaking. Or for animations that need a lot of optimisation for sure
I think mesh lights sampling has been updated since 3.5. You can set it to None if I recall correctly in the material settings or something (can't cofirm rn).
I would approach this by creating a custom colorspace that maps from AgX --> viewing conditions. It would work like the clamping but the clamping knee would be adjustable, much like on film. You can do that with the default AgX --> display transformation by setting the clamping to 1.0 and adjusting exposure, but without the knee, it will be guesswork and probably still looks unnatural. I'm tempted to experiment with a custom colorspace.
Those 3 edges shadows cUses by the mesh light, is probably because that doesnt have a setring for aoft shadows like real lights have. The point light actually has more physical correct shadows because it has more settings
The softness is indirectly defined by the mesh shape itself, or actually by the geo face sizes. Thinner spiral = sharper shadow, thicker spiral = softer shadow.
@@SellusionStar what donyou mean by thinner spiral? With lights there is a fall of which can be edited. Oke could do this by adding a mesh around the light, but that will cause extra bounces and more difficult to clear render
Amazing stuff, i just started 4 months ago, i had those flickering lights in every render i did, then i found "Neat Video" denoiser, and i render without fear of flickers :D Your technique is amazing, but it still has flickers, which come from blender's denoiser
Thanks, actually i use an emission material with the same technique as the glass, mixing emitting material with a non emitting one through (is camera ray) and sure add a suitable lamp as the light source
It's awesome, but I personally prefer to light group and disable certain passes per object, + you can have 2 lights in a lamp one area light pointed inside of lamp and one spot light matching size of emitter precisely. and for emitter disable everything beside camera pass. But honestly best results if you actually render emitter for longer time (just disable caustics and disable for glass certain passes in object visibility like: shadow, glossy, diffuse) then it would just let it through (or use Imeshh glass shader). I personally compare results in shadow sharpness and brightness and then adjust my light sources respectfully.
Turn off shadows, just like with glass for windows. The idea is the same. What can also cause the issue, is the very detailed mesh which is emitting. You could also use an image texture which always points to the camera. Thats much more efficient vs real mesh emitter
@@RomboutVersluijs oh totally! So in my experiments, with this glass node set up, whether I had shadows enabled or disabled it had absolutely no difference, the noise/firefly pattern was also exactly the same. although I think it is definitely good practice to turn it off as you mentioned! Perhaps it had the same noise pattern but increased render time
@@imeshh that's strange, yet I wonder what happens when the checkbox is off in the mesh. 8nthink the glass is still affected by the light since you wanted it to show on the glass. Not sure how well the shadow ray vs shadow off on mesh difference in render result. Worth a test right. Guess I need to check your example file. Always nice to see your videos and aolutions
Some wngines use a trick to get eid of fire flies or hots spots. That is to render at xw or x4 and then scale it back down to the original size. Due to the wcal8ng of the inagez most times lots 9f fife flies go away. Yet its not as efficient because your rendeing a bigger image. Try to turn of cast shadows on the glass mesh
Hmmm, could this not have worked using the light linking? You can make the filament only illuminate the lamp, and the spot light illuminate everything else!
Blender really needs a fake emitter. Lots of engines have this and can solve many of the fire fly issues. In my old engine, a light inside a glass material also causes super high render times due to the caustics need to be renderer. If you don't need that, turn of shadows and caustics. It's just time consuming and most of times you hardly see it, yet the engine needs to do tons of calculations
You should never use Blenders spatial denoiser for animations, you need a temporal denoiser for that. It will always glitch in some way between frames. Denoise animations in a post production software, that supports temporal denoising like AE, Nuke or Fusion. Blender´s denoising is only viable for stills. Instead of putting up this light path thing, you could use light linking, which Blender supports.
@@raulgalets clamping can affect the entire image and reduce very bright areas which is not always good. Sometime very bright areas exist for a reason. This let's you control specific region from noise
Since the target samples is so low, there is very little chance for really any part of the image to hit the noise threshold. Adaptive sampling can help focus on noisy areas, but if the overall sample count is insufficient, the image will likely remain noisy despite the threshold setting. The blochiness is from the denoiser itself struggling to deal with the additional noise. Nevertheless, I just did a test and unchecking noise threshold made absolutely no different to the blochiness and the improved version was cleaner.
@@imeshh btw this rarely happened to men, but if ever it does i usually do temporal Denoise with normals and noise pass , but the thing is I always render my stuff at 50-100 samples and keep that noise threshold off and it works , it never happened to me .....can u share the blend file setup to render blotchiness ... Let me have a look and I'll report back whatever happens
@@imeshh There is actually a situation where the noise treshold can activate mistakenly at low samples, deactivate pixels too soon and leave gaps in the noise. I am definitely seeing that happen in your "worst case" scene, this is what causes the black gaps in the noise (and what ensures this scene's noise could never become clean no matter the "max samples" you choose). What's happening is the noise is so sparse that the noise treshold can mistakenly think some pixels are clean because the noise hasn't even appeared yet on those pixels and they are empty. The "min samples" setting exists specifically to fix this problem. It renders a certain number of samples before the treshold starts being used, which gives the more complicated light patterns a chance to appear in a more complete form. If you don't choose a "min samples" value, Cycles picks one for you based on a fraction of the max samples, and what it picks might not be enough depending on the scene. Of course, you wouldn't render this scene with the "worst case" setup, but this same problem can happen in more normal scenes with complicated lighting and reflections. This is why it can be a good idea to pick a "min samples" value manually. I like to start with 32 (a number that works in most scenes), but an interior with shiny floors, metallic objects everywhere and a narrow beam of sunlight on the floor might need as many as 256 min samples to avoid those mistaken gaps in the noise.
Do you have a camera and microphones installed inside of my house?? Because I’ve encountered this problem few weeks ago and now you’re providing solution😳
@@MrRuumi1 😂 now my secret is out
Thats google, not him
That's an elegant solution. I haven't yet faced the original issue myself, but these kinds of lights are going to be core to upcoming Blender work. Thanks for sharing the information and the setup!
You have solved the pretty much exact niche issue I've been facing. Thanks mate! Subbed!
Hey! One idea I have is you can use light linking which was introduced in blender 3.3 which allows you to select specific collections in which your lights influence. I use it ALLLLL the time now.
Great tips! And I like your thought process. I'm always on the lookout for efficient workflows which includes both reducing render times without sacrificing quality and reducing the amount of time I spend fiddling around in post. This helps both of those issues.
Great explanation 👏👏👏 I do use the area light part but not the extra bulb/filament part (although often if the camera doesn't see the bulb in a light, I just delete the bulb, obviously depends on the lampshade and etc)
@@ChrisAirey1 oh totally, it the bulb I can't see I just leave a point light or something haha. The filament was an interesting experiment for sure!
I like this solution! the only thing I found that worked was to denoise all the passes separately (just using the normal, not the denoising normal or denoising albedo (that takes super long if you're doing it for every pass, and it doesn't end up looking much different).
What if you used an area light behind the filament, used light linking to affect only the filament, so it looks like the light is coming from it, and then a point light to illuminate the scene ? I haven't tried this so not sure if it work would, but that's what came to mind first.
I tried it and am finding an issue with the poiny light passijg through the glass. After the light linking fix, my poiny lighy ks trapped inside the filament and is not exiting (I have similar scene but with a flashlight). As a quick fix if I turn off shadow ray visibility for my glass it kind of fixes the issue but it doesn't seem to a clean fix
This is super cool. I had this issue in a scene i had a bunch of string lights supposedly lighting the scene, and I dont think I ever really solved the issue. I might have to crack the scene open again and try your method. I'm not sure I understood the theory behind the light linking but thats on me to go learn that.
Thank you so much for your idea and the finished implementation, which is also so easy to download.
No problem! :))
Do you need to have the emission set so high for the filament? Now that you are faking the lighting from it with the point lights would it not render cleaner/faster with emission set to just 1 or 10 at most? It would never occur to me to set it to 1000 in any situation due to noise issues. I often use lights to enhance emission effects in LEDs/buttons etc when doing product renders and have never seen much of a slow down on low values.
That ray bounce 8s actually a really good substitute for a fake emitter. That super nice!
Very Cool Useful Tutorial!!! Thanks!!! 👍😁
No problem! Hopefully gives you some ideas on how to speed up/deal with glass and bulbs!
This is great. As a beginner, im always struggling at night scenes where my gpu sometimes overheats. This is a big answer
This is amazing. Reminds me of a trick used by Roger Deakins and his gaffers in real life to manage exposure on the higher range when practical bulbs in frame should actually light the scene. The would hide a high power bulb behind the lower one thus maintaining the highlights of the shot. Your purpose is different but similar.
Nice, was looking for something to speed up my renders!! ❤❤
You make it so easy, awesome work.
Thank you very much!
In this specific case, you used a close-up shot. Would this kind of scenario have an impact on a typical scene where an entire room is shown with multiple light sources?
My second question is related to render settings. So, from what I understood in the video, for still images, it’s perfectly fine to set Indirect Light to 0, and that value is increased only when working on animations?
Another thing I noticed is that all Max Bounces are set to 32 (by the way, from your previous tutorials, I’ve also adopted these values as default for final renders). I assume you didn’t have volumetric objects in this scene, so could you explain why the Volume slot is also set to 32? If you don’t have fog or clouds, would setting Volume to 0 speed up render times?
Thanks for the helpful tips. Cheers.
I would still probably use this in a full scene, especially if it was an animation that needed optimisation. If it was a still image, i'd probably render the entire room with the lamp and see how it turns out, if it is fine and render isn't taking too long i'd leave it. But I can very easily use this method going forward anyway, just to be safe. You enver know when the client will say "oh we want an animation of this now"
Clamping Indirect will generally be fine with the denoiser for still images, unless you have an object casting quite a lot of noise/fireflies into the scene. It is quite scene dependant really, but most archviz scenes would be fine (unless lighting it from noisy objects like bulbs/weird glass etc)
Ah yeah i have it 32 by default to get absolute maximum bounces. But it is definitely overkill, you can probably get away with half that, but my render time is still always manageable, in this scene for example the frames were about 10 seconds in the end so no complaints. If I'm doing animations and desperately need to save every second then I'll look more into it.
I think it can increase render time if there is no volume and you tell it there is volume, I think it is then expecting it. But it never appears to introduce much more render time for it to be an issue. If I need a highly optimised scene I'd turn it off, but even then I rarely see much of a difference. Definitely need to do some tests for this!
Great info. Makes all those pretty bulbs you got more usable, especially in close up shots. 🤘
Amazing bro! Its crazy how having math and nodes available you find new creative solutions... Tnx
Nice little tricks that make the difference. Thank you!
Great stuff Kris! Soooo now I'm wondering if I go into the .blend files for all the iMeshh assets that I use for lighting and change them, or just do it as needed? I do a lot of interior shots that sometimes take too long...and maybe this is one reason. Thanks for the downloadable files! I'll be using them.
@@MrWoundedalien I'd definitely say it is scene dependant, I think in a lot of instances the fireflies/noise will probably be limited to the area around the lamp and for stills it would probably render and be denoised perfectly fine. Most Archviz scenes require plenty of samples to clear it up anyway. I think if the main scene is being illuminated by a visible bulb then it would probably require some tweaking. Or for animations that need a lot of optimisation for sure
@@imeshh Ok, great! Thanks so much!
Man, just fantastic solution! Thank you a lot, for share
Hopefully in the near future we get a temporally-aware denoiser that's more robust for animated scenes like this.
I think mesh lights sampling has been updated since 3.5. You can set it to None if I recall correctly in the material settings or something (can't cofirm rn).
I was struggling with this problem literally a week ago and I found your video now.....
Interesting. I'm going to try this out for my next project at work.
If you would put down point light bounces from 1024 to 3 or 4. You will benefit even more
@@grishkamm also good idea! Maybe could do a mix of that as well
Thanks for this! really cool trick
I would approach this by creating a custom colorspace that maps from AgX --> viewing conditions. It would work like the clamping but the clamping knee would be adjustable, much like on film. You can do that with the default AgX --> display transformation by setting the clamping to 1.0 and adjusting exposure, but without the knee, it will be guesswork and probably still looks unnatural. I'm tempted to experiment with a custom colorspace.
Those 3 edges shadows cUses by the mesh light, is probably because that doesnt have a setring for aoft shadows like real lights have. The point light actually has more physical correct shadows because it has more settings
The softness is indirectly defined by the mesh shape itself, or actually by the geo face sizes. Thinner spiral = sharper shadow, thicker spiral = softer shadow.
@@SellusionStar what donyou mean by thinner spiral? With lights there is a fall of which can be edited. Oke could do this by adding a mesh around the light, but that will cause extra bounces and more difficult to clear render
However, I've seen node setups which can alter the fall of of a mesh light
How to do that in octane blender
Amazing stuff, i just started 4 months ago, i had those flickering lights in every render i did, then i found "Neat Video" denoiser, and i render without fear of flickers :D
Your technique is amazing, but it still has flickers, which come from blender's denoiser
Thanks, actually i use an emission material with the same technique as the glass, mixing emitting material with a non emitting one through (is camera ray) and sure add a suitable lamp as the light source
It's awesome, but I personally prefer to light group and disable certain passes per object, + you can have 2 lights in a lamp one area light pointed inside of lamp and one spot light matching size of emitter precisely. and for emitter disable everything beside camera pass. But honestly best results if you actually render emitter for longer time (just disable caustics and disable for glass certain passes in object visibility like: shadow, glossy, diffuse) then it would just let it through (or use Imeshh glass shader). I personally compare results in shadow sharpness and brightness and then adjust my light sources respectfully.
Turn off shadows, just like with glass for windows. The idea is the same. What can also cause the issue, is the very detailed mesh which is emitting. You could also use an image texture which always points to the camera. Thats much more efficient vs real mesh emitter
@@RomboutVersluijs oh totally! So in my experiments, with this glass node set up, whether I had shadows enabled or disabled it had absolutely no difference, the noise/firefly pattern was also exactly the same. although I think it is definitely good practice to turn it off as you mentioned! Perhaps it had the same noise pattern but increased render time
@@imeshh that's strange, yet I wonder what happens when the checkbox is off in the mesh. 8nthink the glass is still affected by the light since you wanted it to show on the glass. Not sure how well the shadow ray vs shadow off on mesh difference in render result. Worth a test right. Guess I need to check your example file. Always nice to see your videos and aolutions
One of the problems i have with blender is using blenders scale set to anything other than metres. The wattage of bulbs just doesn’t scale well.
thank you so much
Some wngines use a trick to get eid of fire flies or hots spots. That is to render at xw or x4 and then scale it back down to the original size. Due to the wcal8ng of the inagez most times lots 9f fife flies go away. Yet its not as efficient because your rendeing a bigger image. Try to turn of cast shadows on the glass mesh
Yes lighting queeeen🎉❤❤
😂😂 thank you
Nice!
Outside the box solution indeed
Hmmm, could this not have worked using the light linking? You can make the filament only illuminate the lamp, and the spot light illuminate everything else!
TH-cam compression laughs at your work.
@@SlyNine 😂 the amount of videos I do talking about subtle changes in noise and TH-cam just destroys it. "it's really there I promise you guys!"
You are golden my bro 🤘🤘🤘SUB
People that can bend the laws of physics that easily are just build different. I could never come up with a solution like that. D_D"
😂 thank you. Give it an experiment and see what comes out
Blender really needs a fake emitter. Lots of engines have this and can solve many of the fire fly issues. In my old engine, a light inside a glass material also causes super high render times due to the caustics need to be renderer. If you don't need that, turn of shadows and caustics. It's just time consuming and most of times you hardly see it, yet the engine needs to do tons of calculations
You should never use Blenders spatial denoiser for animations, you need a temporal denoiser for that. It will always glitch in some way between frames. Denoise animations in a post production software, that supports temporal denoising like AE, Nuke or Fusion. Blender´s denoising is only viable for stills. Instead of putting up this light path thing, you could use light linking, which Blender supports.
sorry if I am wrong, cause it obviously works, but this looks like clamping with extra steps
@@raulgalets clamping can affect the entire image and reduce very bright areas which is not always good. Sometime very bright areas exist for a reason. This let's you control specific region from noise
@@imeshh I see so this gives you more controle. nice. I'll probably make this into a node group. thanks very much
cant read non of the nodes you are describing, thanks for the effort regardless
that blochiness is because of that noise threshold checkbox , leave it unticked its causing all the issue !
Since the target samples is so low, there is very little chance for really any part of the image to hit the noise threshold. Adaptive sampling can help focus on noisy areas, but if the overall sample count is insufficient, the image will likely remain noisy despite the threshold setting.
The blochiness is from the denoiser itself struggling to deal with the additional noise.
Nevertheless, I just did a test and unchecking noise threshold made absolutely no different to the blochiness and the improved version was cleaner.
@@imeshh btw this rarely happened to men, but if ever it does i usually do temporal Denoise with normals and noise pass , but the thing is I always render my stuff at 50-100 samples and keep that noise threshold off and it works , it never happened to me .....can u share the blend file setup to render blotchiness ... Let me have a look and I'll report back whatever happens
@@imeshh There is actually a situation where the noise treshold can activate mistakenly at low samples, deactivate pixels too soon and leave gaps in the noise. I am definitely seeing that happen in your "worst case" scene, this is what causes the black gaps in the noise (and what ensures this scene's noise could never become clean no matter the "max samples" you choose).
What's happening is the noise is so sparse that the noise treshold can mistakenly think some pixels are clean because the noise hasn't even appeared yet on those pixels and they are empty. The "min samples" setting exists specifically to fix this problem. It renders a certain number of samples before the treshold starts being used, which gives the more complicated light patterns a chance to appear in a more complete form. If you don't choose a "min samples" value, Cycles picks one for you based on a fraction of the max samples, and what it picks might not be enough depending on the scene.
Of course, you wouldn't render this scene with the "worst case" setup, but this same problem can happen in more normal scenes with complicated lighting and reflections. This is why it can be a good idea to pick a "min samples" value manually. I like to start with 32 (a number that works in most scenes), but an interior with shiny floors, metallic objects everywhere and a narrow beam of sunlight on the floor might need as many as 256 min samples to avoid those mistaken gaps in the noise.