innoBright Technologies has released Altus 1.5, the latest update to its standalone tool for denoising images generated in a range of common renderers, including Arnold, Redshift and Maxwell Render.

The update, which is still officially in beta, adds support for denoising multilayer EXRs, stereoscopic images, and any number of AOVs. It also officially adds support for GPU acceleration via CUDA as well as OpenCL.

Generate quick, noisy renders, then clean them up in post
Launched last fall, the software works along similar lines to the Denoise option introduced in RenderMan 20: in this case, automatically removing noise from raytraced images generated using Monte Carlo methods.

According to innoBright  Altus 1.5, this combined rendering and post-processing workflow acclerates Monte Carlo renders by 200-1,200% over simply generating an equivalently noise-free image in the host render engine.

Altus Demo from innoBright.

The software can handle depth of field and motion blur and supports both still renders and animations.

Since Altus’s original release, both Render Legion and Chaos Group have introduced their own denoising systems in Corona Renderer and V-Ray.

Better handling of EXRs, under-the-hood improvements
The 1.5 update introduces support for denoising stereoscopic images in side-by-side format, and multilayered EXR files. innoBright describes the latter as still “a bit tricky” and refers users to the release notes.

There is also a new GUI, which supports the new features, and which can be called from the command line.

Altus 1.5 also now supports any AOV pass – the firm’s newsletter says you can use any number of AOVs; the release notes say up to six via the new GUI – and command-line setup has been simplified.

In addition, Altus now officially supports GPU acceleration via Nvidia’s CUDA API as well as the hardware-agnostic OpenCL, with the CUDA binary bundled in the main download for the software.

Pricing and availability
innoBright  Altus 1.5 is available for 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04 LTS or CentOS 6.x Linux and Windows. The software is rental-only: floating licenses start at $25/month

Integration scripts (for Maya/Arnold and Maya/V-Ray, plus a script for 3ds Max/V-Ray created by Chaos Group) are available free, or you can configure Altus manually for use with any suitable renderer.

Download for Windows X64

Download for Linux