I'm working on my next episode and I've noticed an odd shimmer when I render my characters in Blender 3.5. It's hard to describe, but you can see the effect  here: https://youtu.be/ByJDE0rx6Uk
Notice that the non-character textures do not have this shimmer effect, so it has nothing to do with the lighting. I'm using 1.5.8.5 of the CC/IC Blenbder addon (updated today and retested to be sure). Any ideas on what might be going on?

- Jeff
The Adventures of Capt Sanchez
Cybernautic Studios

If I had to guess: Temporal artifacts in the denoiser due to low sample rates.

The skin shader is particularly noisy because of the subsurface scattering, particularly with low levels of light. If the sample rate is too low the denoiser is going to produce noticeably different results from frame to frame.

Or, you may just need to change the denoiser. It defaults to OpenImage now, I think in earlier versions it used to set to OptiX.

Thanks Victor,
   I'm running tests on this now. My initial settings for noise were a threshold of 1.0 (I know, crazy high  but good for testing animations and not textures), 1024 samples (which were never reached because the noise threshold is so high) with the Optix denoise for Albedo and normal. Render time per frame is ~2sec, which is a dream comme true render rate :)
   I updated the addon to  today's released version of 1.6
   I've tried this now with a threshold of 0.01, 128 samples using OpenImage, Albedo and Normal set to Accurate and the render times are ~2.75 minutes. I''m still seeing the flicker, though it is somewhat reduced. I think you've put me on the right path and I will continue to experiment with the render settings and the light paths to see if I can find the right combination. I'll report back when I do!

- Jeff
The Adventures of Capt Sanchez
Cybernautic Studios

Ok, I was able  to elimate the shimmering by adjusting my rendering settings. For reference, I have included the settings that I tested and their results (Poor, Better, Good) along with the per frame render times (I'm rendering on a pretty fast machine with a RTX 4090) The last result is what I will use for final renders now. Thanks for your help with this Victor!

Settings	Time/frame	Results
Cycles, GPU,  Noise 0.01, 64 samples, Light Paths 8, 1, 4, 8, 2, 8, OpenImage, Albedo +Normal, Accurate	1m 13s	Poor
Cycles, GPU,  Noise 0.01, 64 samples, Light Paths 12, 4, 4, 12, 0, 8, OpenImage, Albedo +Normal, Accurate	1m 15s	Poor
Cycles, GPU,  Noise 0.01, 64 samples, Light Paths 12, 4, 4, 12, 0, 8, Optix, Albedo+Normal	1m 28s	Poor
Cycles, GPU,  Noise 0.01, 64 samples, Light Paths 32, 32, 32, 32, 0, 32, Optix, Albedo+Normal (frames 1  - 30)	3s	Poor
Cycles, GPU,  Noise 0.01, 128 samples, Light Paths 32, 32, 32, 32, 0, 32, Optix, Albedo+Normal (frames 31  - 60)	7.5s	Poor
Cycles, GPU,  Noise 0.01, 512 samples, Light Paths 32, 32, 32, 32, 0, 32, Optix, Albedo+Normal (frames 61  - 90)	18s	Much Better
Cycles, GPU,  Noise 0.01, 1024 samples, Light Paths 32, 32, 32, 32, 0, 32, Optix, Albedo+Normal (frames 91  - 120)	35.25s	Very  good

- Jeff
The Adventures of Capt Sanchez
Cybernautic Studios