Separate Subsurface Denoising
In Blender 2.79 it was possible to denoise the Subsurface pass separately.
Now Subsurface and Diffuse passes are combined together. In scenes with skin or other SSS materials, most of the noise often comes from Subsurface while Diffuse is already clean.
This means we have to denoise Diffuse unnecessarily, which can soften details and textures.
It would be useful to have separate denoising for the Subsurface pass again.
This idea was marked as a duplicate of Cycles: Add Separate Render Passes for Coat, Sheen, SSS and Metallic — Fix Premult Inconsistency.
3 Comments
I think this feature request is related to your request. If SSS had its own render pass, you could denoise only the SSS passes in the compositor.
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/AWmB/
Just as you can currently choose whether or not to denoise the volume in the compositor
Marked as a duplicate. I searched for "subsurface" before posting and couldn't find anything relevant
Yeah. Cycles is evolving really quickly, and new features like texture caching in 5.2 are great and urgently needed (especially now that RAM and GPU prices are so crazy). But many features are still simply missing or cause massive problems with more advanced rendering and compositing... just like with the lack of an SSS pass
I'm currently having massive problems with the depth pass in my project. For one thing, there’s no way to create an anti-aliased depth pass that also accounts for transparency (for example, on leaves that use an opacity map ) which is important for "depth fog effects" in compositing.
Additionally, there’s also no way to disable fog volumes for the calculation of depth and position AOVs, except by creating an additional view layer without the volumes, just to get the position and Z passes... but that increases the render time so incredibly unnecessarily, just for 2 utility passes blender.community/c/rightclickselect/n8VE/
If you are often rendering e.g. skin you might want to check out Octane (if you haven’t already). I haven’t used Octane that much yet either, but it allows you to render SSS separately and is relatively well integrated into Blender. I think the trial version also allows commercial use and only limits you to rendering on a single GPU, but I’d double-check that.