[SOLVED] Denoiser for baked maps ?

Hey, is that pixellation as in requiring too many samples? Is there a workaround using simple colour maps and multiplying an AO pass or something?

Or rendering to a larger texture map, then downsampling?

I’ve been lucky because some of the baking I’ve done has been from a scan, so I only have to tick the ‘Colour’ option, not direct light.

@xeon,
It seems that you have researched this topic thoroughly already. I was going to suggest the brute-force technique of increasing the samples in Cycles. I understand that you have tried this and found the time required unacceptable, but before you give up on the brute-force high-sample bake solution, you may want to check some Blender settings. As you know baking in Blender is weird (I am being kind). Here are a few settings to check. I will assume that you are using one or more graphics cards with an Nvidia 10xx GPU or newer.

1. Make sure that you are using CUDA on your GPU only (Edit->Preference->System->Cycles Rendering Devices). DO NOT USE RTX. Don’t include your CPU under CUDA even if you have a Threadripper or some other hot chip.
2. If you have more than one graphics card, verify that all of them are selected under the CUDA option.
3. Make sure that you are actually using your GPU to bake. The board partner that built your graphics card should offer a tool to monitor GPU activity. During the baking process, the GPU load should be 100%. Do not use Windows Task Manager for this. It does not do a good job showing GPU load.
4. Set your tile size to 256×256

My point is that Blender likes using the CPU to bake. Blender is sneaky and does not warn you when it does this. You can have the “Device” setting in the render properties tab set to “GPU Compute” and Blender might still default to the CPU if your settings are not quite correct. GPU baking is easily 10x faster than the fastest CPU out there.

Please let me know if I am wildly off-base here. Thanks.

Hi Xeon,
Yep. That is an odd setup for Blender. It is very nice, but not ideal for Blender. I have a Mac with an AMD Vega 56 GPU. It is nice, but I never use it for Cycles rendering.

You know this, but I will state this for everyone else reading this thread: Blender on Mac OS does not use the GPU for Cycles rendering. As a result, Blender will use the CPU for Cycles render tasks. It will be very slow.

FYI, I just did an 8k texture bake at 1,000 samples on a pair of NVidia 10xx on a PC. It took less than an hour.

I wonder if one of the cloud-based Blender render services supports texture baking. If it did, that could be a cheap solution.

I am glad you found an acceptable solution.

PS, the tile size suggestion assumed a GPU. GPUs use bigger tiles. Since you are using a CPU, you should use a size closer to the default.

Here’s a new video tutorial how we in soft8soft team baking AO maps.