Denoised render's shadows too distorted without Indirect light clamping - too opaque with Indirect clamping. How do these interact?

Question

You can read in my previous thread about my struggle with this part. I made a milestone just now, increasing Indirect clamp will remove the fireflies, however the shadows are now too opaque.

Render with Indirect Clamp to 0, lots of fireflies and denoise distort:

same settings except I changed Image to Denoiser instead of Noisy image to Denoiser node, still distorted but more detail seem intact:

Render with Indirect clamp set to 2.0, shadow too opaque:

Render with Indirect clamp set to 5.0, this is the best result I got so far but I still feel is nowhere near the ideal result:

This is Andrew's cup in the tutorial, the lighting I am aiming for:

Am I focusing too much on Indirect clamp? Are there other settings I should attempt to play around with?

I am using Blender 2.92.0 with my GPU Radeon RX 5700 here is my blender file: https://pasteall.org/blend/85a361fe32cd41378a4fe8721f693aa0

If you attempt to render my file please let me know if any settings are local that I need to change, or if they are per blender file.

Hello and welcome. Please don't post the same question more than once. If your previous question was closed, address raised the issues by editing it, otherwise see What should I do if no one answers my question? — Duarte Farrajota Ramos, Apr 12 '21 at 16:47

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 12 '21 at 16:02

I ended up making a new Blender project and appending the cup, donut, sprinkles in their respective collections into the new blender project and lighting appears ok now! :D Never found out what went wrong in my old file, there is some setting hidden in there that made shadows iffy.

Denoised render's shadows too distorted without Indirect light clamping - too opaque with Indirect clamping. How do these interact?

1 Answers1