[RESOLVED] No denoise when rendering animation frames

[Weezer]

I have denoise turned on, I have an image style set up, I'm rendering to frames – but it's not denoising. It's rendering out the diffuse and normals passes for denoising, but the image is obviously not being denoised. Any ideas?

[Weezer]

Well it seems that you have to be in Product mode for this to work – which isn't what I wanted. I wonder why Denoise is limited to Product mode?

[Eugen Fetsch]

Hack the system!

It should work for all KeyShot versions that have a Diffuse Pass and a Normal Pass available.

As far as I can see, KeyShot is using the Intel Open Image Denoiser. Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but I got exactly the same results using it. So, what can we do with that information? 

Start Blender 2.81a (with integrated Intel Denoiser) -> go to the "Compositing" tab -> click "Use Nodes" -> create the same node setup as in the image below. Hit "render" and save the image or the animation.
Don't forget to switch the color management from Filmic to Standard (marked in the image), to get same results as in KS.

Few remarks:
I'm not a big fan of the Intel denoiser for final images - it "kills" the details in your textures. But, it's still amazing for quick previews with very low samples.
You can try the NVIDIA OptiX AI-Denoiser instead. It is available as a plugin ("D-NOISE") for Blender too.   
In any case, you'll have issues with animations and scenes that have Fur/Hair/Fuzz (name it). If you need good animation denoising you should go with another solution like "Neat Video" (LINK). This denoiser analyses multiple frames to keep the details.

Hope that helps.
P.S.: Blend file attached.

[Sune]

Hi,

Denoise is not limited to Product mode.

I have attached two very noisy animations, both rendered in Interior mode, one with denoise on.
There is a clear difference.

This might mean that the issue is specific to your scene. Could you please save it as a .ksp and send it to me with this link

[Weezer]

Sorry for late reply! I think the issue is that I was saving to a .mov file instead of frames. All seems to be working now (getting lots of diffuse and normal passes, which I believe 9.1 solves).

I'm doing an animation of buildings with lots of detail and the denoise works well with the mix set to 0.5. I'm using a 24-core Mac Pro and Keyshot is churning through frames in 15 seconds that took Cinema 4D around 100. Gotta love this app!