Progressive vs Non Progressive rendering

[kiryha]

When using "Preview" option in Render controls toolbar after some short amount of time I get an image with a very small SSS grain size:

If I turn off this option and render the final image I get huge grain:

Render settings:

I try to increase SSS Quality but I just get more SSS samples with the same size. How can I achieve this Progressive SSS look with render settings and what is going on in this mode in general?

[davpe]

that's interesting. i've seen some look differences with progressive vs. bucket render, this is really extreme case thou. i wonder if it gives the same result even with rendering engine set to Raytrace?

[anim]

this has always been the case, progressive rendering (preview) always uses Raytrace so if your engine is Micropoly, you will see the difference

[kiryha]

True, with Raytrace Render Engine I got the same look as with Progressive! That raises a new question: which rendering engine should I use in case of a scene with a lot of geometry, instances, volumes, lights, hairs, SSS, MB, DOF, GI at once?
While I will go through Understanding mantra rendering I thought there might be a simple answer for this.
 

[davpe]

micropolygon can offer a good performance with volumes, particles, hair, DOF, and MB. it's not friends with anything pbr or raytraced thou. that means any modern pbr shaders, area lights, raytraced environment lights are bad and will render quite slow. if you wanna go with micropoly, stick to shadow maps and old school shader models (lambert, phong...). that makes it largely obsolete these days unless dealing with heavy volumes or particle sims,and perhaps some other special cases that are difficult to raytrace. heavy geometry and instances are not benefitting from micropoly in any way i would say (maybe rather opposite bcs unlike raytracing, micropoly needs to fit an entire scene in memory at once, if i  understand it correctly)

Edited July 12, 2019 by davpe

[kiryha]

Ok, so PBR is my choice then, simple answer