Messing around with H16, attached the (new?) Skin Shader Core on an object and right out of the box it's pretty noisy. Upped the Pixel Samples in Mantra up to 9 but even then still getting noise. What do I have to modify to reduce the noise?

It seems to help to increase the Min Ray Samples to 4 and Max Ray Samples to 64, with Pixel Samples set to 6x6. I don't know what the source of the noise is in the shader, though, so there may be some change that would help more.

The noise is likely coming from subsurface scatter. There's “SSS Quality” slider on mantra ROP that you can adjust. The new SSS is pure raytraced solution, so it tends to get noisier with increased scatter distance. If you haven't yet touched the “scattering distance” or “distance multiplier” parameters on the skin shader, I recommend that you adjust them until you reach the desired look, then adjust the quality settings.

dlee
The noise is likely coming from subsurface scatter. There's “SSS Quality” slider on mantra ROP that you can adjust. The new SSS is pure raytraced solution, so it tends to get noisier with increased scatter distance. If you haven't yet touched the “scattering distance” or “distance multiplier” parameters on the skin shader, I recommend that you adjust them until you reach the desired look, then adjust the quality settings.

Thanks dlee. I left the scattering distance and distance multipliers as default and upped the SSS Quality and Reflection Quality to 3 in the mantra node.

This guide was also pretty handy: http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/render/noise [sidefx.com]