What is the best amount of samples in Cycles?

[IIianII]

Just a simple and easy question about the amount of samples for 512x512 image size. I have been struggling getting the right quality textures, if I can know the right amount of samples that way I would only do minimal work on PS afterwards. Thanks in advance!

I have the default

200 = samples

32 = preview

 

[Chic Aeon]

I can tell you that I bake at 500 on a 1024 texture (lots and lots on one texture these days - woot). That being said, you computer might not be happy with that high a setting.  Generally the smaller your objects, the higher your sample rate needs to be clear. (Sorry that wasn't clear at all. The more you have SCALED DOWN an object to fit compactly on the texture plain, the higher your resolution needs to be. Also if you have a lot of displacement in your texture it can be problematic on large items scaled small -- like buildings. 

 So for example today I made a mini-mall sort of thing with three shops. ALL the exterior textures (brick), the windows and window trim and the door trim were on one 1024 texture. I baked at 500 and it looks really good.

Your preview doesn't really matter -- just what you are comfortable with unless you are taking screenshots to impress folks :D. I typically have mine at 20. 

Edited June 6, 2017 by Chic Aeon

[Aquila Kytori]

@Chic Aeon 

13 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Your preview doesn't really matter -- just what you are comfortable with unless you are taking screenshots to impress folks :D. I typically have mine at 20.

A lttle off topic but have you seen the demos of Eevee ?  Real time rendering coming to Blender with 2.8,

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Chic Aeon]

12 minutes ago, Aquila Kytori said:

A lttle off topic but have you seen the demos of Eevee ?  Real time rendering coming to Blender with 2.8,

Busy with a project but I will definitely look at those soon. Thanks!   

[KatyProxima]

Eevee definitely looks cool as a rendering viewport, but the question is...  is Eevee going to work also as a baking engine? Unluckily it seems there is no intention to implement Eevee for baking yet (at least not in the development version of Blender 2.80). So, I don't have much hopes there, because baking always had a very little priority in the Blender development, which explains why there is still no proper anti-aliasing for baking yet.

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, KatyProxima said:

So, I don't have much hopes there, because baking always had a very little priority in the Blender development, which explains why there is still no proper anti-aliasing for baking yet.

Yes, messy angled lines for sure and baking at 500 (or higher) doesn't help that.  Unfortunately some creators don't bother to "fix" the issue  in post-processing. Really ugly.  Sorry to hear it isn't fixed yet.   

I am still in 2.78 since a bunch of plugin that I sometimes use no longer worked in 2.79.   There were some other issues for me too but I don't remember now LOL.  Hopefully 2.80 will work better for me. 

 

 

[KatyProxima]

20 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Yes, messy angled lines for sure and baking at 500 (or higher) doesn't help that.  Unfortunately some creators don't bother to "fix" the issue  in post-processing. Really ugly.  Sorry to hear it isn't fixed yet.   

I am still in 2.78 since a bunch of plugin that I sometimes use no longer worked in 2.79.   There were some other issues for me too but I don't remember now LOL.  Hopefully 2.80 will work better for me.

Actually, there was added certain kind of AA some time ago, which significantly improves the quality of baking procedural materials generated by random noise textures. But alas, this is not the complete AA filter that would work also on mesh geometry and intersecting edges

Related patches to this AA filter: https://developer.blender.org/T43388 https://developer.blender.org/D1254

Yeah, it's sad for us that the development of baking in Blender is so slow. Many times I have been hesitating to migrate to 3D-Coat or Substance Painter for baking, but these programs has other nasty issues, e.g. they don't allow to bake and export any full/combined pass including light effects, which we need so badly for SL.