Blender - Branched path tracing explained
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange users link it when someone needs a clearer explanation of branched path tracing and per-material sample tuning than the manual gives.
Recommended by 3 people across 3 different months, 2018 to 2020.
What it is
A 26-minute tutorial by Alex Petrov on the branched path tracing workflow in Blender Cycles. It shows what the various sampling settings do and how they differ, with the author noting it is based on personal experience.
What people said
Recommends Anson Savage · 2018-04 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “What is branched path tracing and how is it useful?”
I just found a really useful video explaining a neat process to go about setting up branched path tracing for a given scene: [this video] I don't know what it is, but Blender's manual always seems really cryptic and unhelpful. This video helped clear up quite a bit of that for me.
Recommends Linguini · 2018-10 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “A bad quality render while it took over 12 hours to render”
If you still can't get a good result with the above option, try using branched path tracing to optimize the sampling for individual types of materials. Learn more about it here: [this video]
Recommends Leander · 2020-09 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Animation artifact issue”
Depending on the complexity of the hdri (wide dynamic range) and the material setup this could be fireflies [LINK] or noise (improve your sample settings possible with branched path tracing [this video] ).