Abstract

In the modern era of physically-based shading, removing the substantial amount of high frequency noise produced by Monte Carlo rendering techniques is a key challenge for production renderers. Beyond the recent advances in sample-based and feature-based denoising, production constraints and scale introduce additional mandatory features for candidate denoisers. In this talk, we discuss how denoising is deployed in Shining, the production renderer developed by Ubisoft Motion Pictures for the Rabbids Invasion animated TV series. The scale of the show, as well as the required control for artists, led us to the integration of a sample-based denoiser, which enables per-AOV denoising control, with a minimum overhead regarding engine integration and production workflow. As a result, \emph{all-effects} denoising is made possible for the new TV series season and proved useful in numerous lighting and material scenarios. At the core of the denoising pipeline, our BCD algorithm, recently made open source, provides a robust and fast mechanism to filter out Monte Carlo noise while retaining features, for complex lighting and viewing conditions, with trivial per-AOV setup.

Video

Downloads

• Preprint: full res. and low res.
• Reference implementation (open source on GitHub)

Related publications

• Full paper on the core BCD algorithm (EGSR 2017, Computer Graphics Forum)

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Boubekeur:2018:DenoisingAtScale,
 author = {Tamy Boubekeur and Malik Boughida and Laurent Noël and Jérémie Defaye and Farchad Bidgolirad},
 title = {Denoising at Scale for Massive Animated Series},
 booktitle = {ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 Talk},
 year = {2018}
}