D-NOISE: AI-Accelerated Denoiser

One of the biggest challegnes with path traced rendering is capturing a noiseless image. To get a noiseless image, path tracing requires the simulation of millions of light rays for even the most basic scenes, let alone complex lighting situations involving volumetrics, caustics, and refractions. In late 2018, I discovered NVIDIA’s OptiX AI-Accelerated Denoiser and saw a tremendous opportunity to that could elevate Blender’s rendering capabilities to heights its never seen before.

The plugin works by passing noisy images from Blender’s image editor through the OptiX AI Denoiser, utilizing multi-pass rendering techniques that include albedo and normal passes, among others, to achieve unrivaled denoising results. The denoised renders are then fed back into Blender for the user to save, composite, or do anything else that they could with a normal render.

D-NOISE, my first product, was also the first AI denoiser ever built for Blender. It was released for FREE in December of 2018, amassed thousands of downloads in just a few weeks, and ultimately became a highlight of many artists workflows, reducing render times by as much as 90%. Its impact was further highlighted when it was featured at the 2019 Blender Conference during Gleb Alexandrov’s “3D Nebulae and the Power of the Blender Community” presentation.

D-NOISE is one of my favorite projects that shows just how successful you can be when you have the right tools and the right skills at the right time.