In addition to beauty passes, the denoiser supports denoising additional AOVs. Denoising AOVs with the denoiser UI is done by treating the extra AOVs as either diffuse, specular, albedo, irradiance, alpha, or color passes.

In order to denoise these extra passes, the AOVs to be denoised need to be rendered to separate EXR displays, then they can be mapped to the default pass types using the preferences window in the denoiser UI.

Extra AOV Setup

When denoising additional AOVs, the most important thing is to ensure that the extra AOVs are written to separate files, rather than included in the denoiser's variance input file. These extra files should be saved to the same directory as the variance file. If you've done this correctly, the denoiser UI will show both the variance file and any extra AOV files. The extra AOV files may have a darker gray icon indicating that they contain only the extra AOV. The screenshot below shows this:

In this case, louise.[1-1].exr is our variance file, and louise.subsurface.[1-1].exr is a second file containing an AOV which includes only contributions from subsurface scattering.

For information on how to output AOVs to extra files, consult the DCC-specific pages on Displays. When you output AOVs, make sure that asrgba (or your DCC-specific equivalent) is disabled.

Mapping Extra AOVs

Once you've included the extra AOVs, you need to tell the denoiser how to handle them. You can tell the denoiser to treat these extra AOVs as any of the supported pass types by accessing the preferences, shown in the image below.

Once the preferences menu has opened, you can include a list of channel names for each pass type. The denoiser will then treat these channels as the chosen pass type and denoise them alongside the beauty pass.

Here, we've set up a subsurface AOV to be treated as a diffuse pass when it gets denoised. Once you've configured your passes, press Escape to close the preferences menu. You can then configure the denoiser output directory as you normally would.

Denoised Output

Once you configure the denoiser and run the denoising process, the extra passes will be saved to the aux-diffuse, aux-specular, aux-albedo, aux-irradiance, aux-alpha, or aux-color subdirectories of the denoiser output directory, based on which pass the AOV was configured as.

In our case, our denosied beauty and subsurface only look like this (beauty on the left and subsurface-only on the right):