Volumic lighting is really noisy, any workarounds for this?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

So I’ve been working with volumic lighting and I’ve found that when working in some scenes, I can get good results with something like 600 samples along with the other standard optimizations(clamp, filter glossy, etc.) but once I decide to get some volume effects(added a volume scatter to the scene), the noise got way worse and the only solution I can find so far is to crank the samples all the way up to 2400. Most of the information I can find for optimizing your renders doesn’t deal specifically with volume and I was wondering if there are some settings I can use to improve performance that I’m missing.

Much thanks in advance.

2

On the Sampling control panel switch to branched path tracing and bring up the number of samples for VOLUME.

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3

Hmm, I made some improvement, but nothing dramatic in terms of improved render time. I’m wondering if perhaps there is some way to render out the volume in a separate pass, blur it, and then comp it over the beauty pass. Or is there some way to get a utility pass like a z-depth of motion vector, but with light paths, and use it to drive a filter in post? Maybe use it in conjunction with a mist pass?