Alliteration aside, this blew my mind.
The two images above were both rendered in nearly 18 minutes on a 12 core i7 CPU. All materials and settings everywhere were exactly the same… sort of.
I’ve been playing with image stacking lately, mainly as a tool to render images and animations progressively, but when rendering some glass the other day, I realized that the only reason it renders so slow is because the noise and fireflies don’t change all that much, only more and more of it gets added and eventually averaged out. So if we change the noise pattern and render less samples a couple of times…