You can see in this sample that the results aren’t as good as the Pixar denoiser. But the median filter still saves you a lot of time since the improvement in image noise falls off as the number of samples increases.
Also, I did NOT do the supersampling and downsampling technique on this particular image.
So the first and second are both the same res but one has the filter?
Dude, that’s pretty good! That’s like a 50% reduction right there with almost no visible detriments to accuracy!
I will be trying this today.
Correct, the right image is the left image after the filter was applied. The effect is even better with the supersampling technique in my opinion.
I’m curious to see if/how something like this could be buried inside Cycles. Adding a simple median filter node to the compositor would be a nice step forward. But an advanced solution that treated the image as an underlying near-continuous light function where the signal is reconstructed based on samples could lead to much faster rendering. The sampler could even choose the next ray based on which sample has the potential to improve the reconstruction the most.
Woa, Renderman in Blender?
Where do I get that!?
@john
yup, that’s the catch.
I have managed to find a work around but I don’t think it’s really worth the effort, it doesn’t look THAT much better than cycles and the denoise is basically photoshops surface blur filter.
Anyway if you want to know the work arround,
EVERYTHING, I mean EVERYTHING has to be set up, the lights, the box, the materials, the reflectors,etc before it can render
and it’s painfully slow for me.
Hmm, all I get is a black scene. I can load scenes from others and they render fine so I know I have a good install. I’ve set materials, emissive area lights, etc. nothing renders but blackness. What step am I missing? Can anyone step me through setting up a cube with a light? 
im guessing I’m missing some small but important setting with the Pixar area light shaders, but I don’t know what to do there.
Fdfxd, I want to be able to render motion blurred hair and displacements on projects, that’s why I’m interested in renderman. The plugin, and my knowledge of renderman both have a long way to go, but until cycles solves their issues with motion blur and displacements, then renderman is worth looking into. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Come on guys, I still don’t know how to fix my problem!
All ima say is, Sheep it is my choice of rendering anything.
Maybe you need to increase the “exposure” setting of the light. It works fine for me.
very interesting topic, might check into renderman to see if it has a ‘hobbyist’ kind of capacity. because even smaller companies depend on cycles (which was budgetwise the best choice if ur going photorealistic and/or cartoony) and too complex operations might slow down smaller productions. Maybe I’ll make a video about it … maybe 
The RIS interface is very similar to Cycles in it’s structure. The node titles are different and sometimes don’t connect together in the most obvious ways but the workflow is very similar. Rendering works fine on my single i7 machine, and with the adaptive sampling render times are very close to Cycles. I haven’t tried anything crazy as far as geometry and textures yet though…
