Reducing render times - distributed denoising in 2.79

With the eve of 2.79's denoising feature (among many new and potentially very useful features) and the release candidate now out, we thought we'd share some work we've been doing to reduce render times even further.

The denoising feature has already shown that it can greatly reduce the number of samples required to produce an image with acceptable levels of noise. We've been testing using the denoiser with distributed rendering (as you can see from the screenshot below where you can see our interface loaded in the render properties panel). Our addon uses tile rendering (or bucket rendering as its sometimes called). So being able to distribute the denoising pass seemed tricky to say the least since the denoiser needs the whole image.

Being able to distribute the denoising pass has its advantages, basically speed, its faster since the denoising calculation is effectively done in parallel. By breaking up the render and denoising over multiple machines, we've seen a speedup that is almost linear. That means if you use two computers instead of one, the render takes half the time, three machines, a third and so on.

The addon is still in development, though we've now made it possible for you to register to test a pre-release version. You can do this by visiting our website at crowdrender.com.au .