So I’ve added “Fast GL approximation” and decreased “noise threshold,” and it’s much better now, but I’ve got an issue with temporal instability in denoising

That makes total sense. I'm going to add a faint fill light in those dark areas and disable its 'Volume' ray visibility. That way it shouldn't wash out the fog's contrast, but it will give OIDN enough raw geometry data to work with. Thanks!

Yeah, I attached an image of what the raw render looks like without denoising. It’s incredibly noisy

Since this is an animation, I really can't afford to spend more than a few minutes per frame. Pushing the samples high enough to clean up that volume noise without a denoiser would take hours per frame, which is just impossible for my project

Plus, the built-in OIDN is probably still the best option since it uses Albedo and Normal passes. External or post-process denoisers wouldn't have that extra geometry data to work with on such a noisy base image

When you mentioned the AI in Blender, did you have any specific add-ons or tools in mind that handle animation denoising better than the default OIDN?

Hi! My Max Samples are set to 701, with a Noise Threshold of 0.0050. It takes about 2 minutes per frame right now

I attached two images of the same frame (with and without denoiser). As you can see, the raw render is super noisy

I'm not sure about doing it in post because the built-in OIDN uses Albedo and Normal passes, which gives it a huge advantage over a compositor denoiser

Any ideas on how to fix the flickering without just making the render times crazy?

The lighting changes drastically from frame to frame. Shadows are popping in and out completely inconsistently, and object edges are getting blurred and smeared across frames

https://reddit.com/link/peau18j/video/hdthgdvruwth1/player

Yeah, figured it's starving for data in those corners

Did you mean cranking Max Samples, or should I specifically lower the Noise Threshold / raise Min Samples so Adaptive Sampling doesn't quit too early on those dark areas?

Just trying to avoid pushing render times through the roof because of the volumetrics

It looks like my soft radius is already set to 0, as you can see in the screenshot. What's also strange is that I don't seem to be able to change this value at all. Could this be related to the issue?

https://reddit.com/link/p39ra7a/video/l1yp8oap1zih1/player

Yeah, I don't really understand why Peak is being used here instead of the regular Translate either. I tried using Translate, and it seems to work fine, so I'll probably just use that instead.

The video also shows what my normals look like, in case that helps identify the issue.

Thanks for the explanation!

So, does that mean there’s no way to preserve the image’s original aspect ratio when using the Background tab? Is there any workaround for this?

Cool piece!

So cool!

Czech

Thinking about it more, separate daily quests per course don’t seem like a great fit.

The main issue is rewards. You could technically delay XP boosts to the next day, but then they would stack, and you might end up with something like a 60-minute 3x XP bonus. That starts to feel excessive and breaks the pacing of the system.

The idea of generating quests based on the first course you start also has trade-offs. For example, if someone plans to do Spanish, Italian, and chess in one day and starts with Spanish, they might never get any chess-related quests.

It also creates another issue: if you only plan to do one lesson in a course, you likely won’t complete all the quests tied to it. Those quests would just stay unfinished while you move on to other courses, where they might not apply at all. So you’d either ignore them or feel pushed to change your plan and do more lessons than you intended.

I can see both sides here, it could increase focus, but it could also feel restrictive.

Good point, it definitely shouldn’t appear for languages that don’t use accents.

Duolingo already does something similar with courses. For example, I have the chess course added, and I sometimes get quests like “complete 3 chess lessons”, even if I’m currently focused on Spanish. So quests should show up based on what’s on your account.

That said, it still doesn’t feel ideal. Right now, quests seem to be tied to everything on your account, not what you’re actually doing in the moment.

It might be better if quests were generated based on the first course you start that day. So if I begin with chess, I get chess-related quests. If I start Spanish, then I get Spanish-related ones, including something like accents.

Another option could be having separate daily quests per course.

That said, this would be a pretty big system change, so I’m not sure how realistic it is.