piersyf posted at 9:28AM Thu, 26 November 2015 - #4241019

A_Sunbeam posted at 3:58PM Thu, 26 November 2015 - #4240689

OK, so what am I doing wrong? I opened PP11 with Andy, rendered him with Firefly, then with Superfly default settings. The latter looks rather rough ...

Nobody seems to have answered your question, so I'll tell you (you might know already but others might not). It's to do with samples. Default pixel samples is 3. Try it with 10 and you'll see a massive reduction in grain. In Blender cycles a good 'finished render' is at 100 samples, but it looks like SM have done some sort of factoral reduction (maybe 10 to 1?) because just off the bat it looks like 10 samples in Superfly is around 100 samples in Cycles. I could be wrong... anyone know?

Cycles has the option to express samples in area (total simples) or by dimension (which results in n * n actual area samples per pixel). SM decided only to use the dimensional value. So in SuperFly, when you type 10, you're getting 10 * 10 or 100 samples. When you type 3, you're getting 3 * 3 or 9 samples. I like having smaller numbers to type, but it's a pain when explaining what samples you used. The Cycles community seems to consistently speak in postings using the area value.

When you start a SF render, the progress window actually says how many samples you're going to make, and how many you've done so far.

I agree that the SF samples value 3 (i.e. 9 samples) is really only for test renders and even then only for specific conditions. When I do test renders, I am at 10 (100 samples) because I use mesh lighting almost all the time and it really doesn't do well with less than that.

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