Tuesday, December 11th, 2018 Posted by Jim Thacker

Download the free D-NOISE plugin for Blender


Remington Graphics – aka developer Grant Wilk – has released D-NOISE, a free plugin that implements Nvidia’s AI-guided OptiX render denoising technology within Blender.

As well as renders, the plugin is capable of denoising any image loaded in Blender’s UV or image editors, including texture bakes and even photographs.

Fast, AI-driven denoising for preview renders
Since its release last year, Nvidia’s OptiX denoiser has been widely adopted by renderer developers, and is now integrated in tools including Arnold, Clarisse, finalRender, OctaneRender and V-Ray.

Although its licence terms aren’t compatible with those of Blender, D-NOISE gets around the problem by making the OptiX binaries a separate download so that the plugin itself is GPL-compliant.

Being AI-driven and GPU-based, the OptiX technology often generates usable results faster than its host software’s native denoising system.

However, it’s usually recommended for denosing render previews rather than final-quality renders; and while it can denoise animation, that can result in noticeable inter-frame flickering.

Denoise any render, image or baked texture within Blender
D-NOISE makes OptiX denoising available in Blender’s Cycles renderer and the UV and image editors.

That gives it the unusual distinction of being able to denoise both baked textures and photographs as well as rendered images.

Advanced settings make it possible to use HDRI training data or generate AOVs within Cycles to guide the denoising process, improving image quality at the expense of processing time.

Availability and system requirements
D-NOISE is available for Blender 2.79 running on Windows only under a GPL licence. According to Wilk, support for Blender 2.80 and Linux are “high on the to-do list”.

As you might expect of something based on a proprietary Nvidia technology, you’ll need a Nvidia graphics card to make use of it: it won’t work with AMD or Intel GPUs.

Download the free D-NOISE plugin for Blender from Remington Graphics’ website