Since my last update I first focused on investigating the firefly/noise issue I was having in the test sequence render. I found this documentation helpful:
https://help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_for_maya_noise_am_Removing_Noise_Workflow_html
https://help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_user_guide_ac_render_settings_ac_clamping_html
After some testing, it seems like a combination of higher AA samples, making slight adjustments to the specularity settings of the shaders with the fireflies, and clamping the Camera AA is the best solution. I am rendering a test to make sure the clamping does not affect areas besides the fireflies. I also plan to denoise the AOVs in Nuke.
Before Higher AA Samples and Clamping
After Higher AA Samples and Clamping
I also worked on adjusting the lighting, because I realized compared to my lighting reference there was far too much fill light. The scene felt too evenly lit and needed emphasis where the light comes through the trees, so I lowered the fill light and increased the keylight while paying attention to the macbeth chart.
The fill might need to come back up a little bit, but I want to see how it looks in the composite first. (Note that this test render has subdivisions for the displacement on the ground leaves turned off, and is not composited.)
Lighting Reference (from Unsplash)
