Noise usually refers to fireflies in the image from not enough light sampling during the rendering process. Pixelation is more due to jaggies, e.g. curve looking jagged because the surface is not broken up into enough sub-surfaces. Jaggies can be solved by increasing the sub-surface resolution which can be added to a figure directly – Scene > Edit > Geometry > Convert to SubD or in the Surface pane with displacement maps.

I hope to address the problem through this and other articles I am reading.

I am wondering what the Surface pane has to do with pixelation – one article I read gave steps for reducing pixelation using the Surfaces pane settings, but the interface of the Daz Studio they were using (which they shared screen grabs of) was not like the one in Daz Studio 4.15, exactly, and when I used their suggested settings, it looked like my figure had on white armor or a white exoskeleton.

I used Zev’s morphs combined with the regular Daz body morphs.

Yes, of course you are right and Daz Studio does not know the real value. 😀 I tried to write the text to help improve readability for myself and hopefully for others as well. As you know, the ‘change in value’ thingie is a heuristic used to try and get at the ‘real’ value.

If that were true, Daz would need to know what the “real” value was in order to calculate the convergence % – in which case, why not just jump straight to the real value?

My understanding is that the convergence percentage is the percentage of pixels that DIDN’T change their values in the most recent iteration. So, at the start of the render, it stays 0% for a long time – every pixel changes in every iteration. Then the percentage goes up fairly rapidly as well lit pixels get a stable value. Then it slows down again as the percentage gets higher, and the more stubborn parts of the image inch towards their final values.

Don’t ask me how iray works out whether a given pixel needs to change or not, and to what. It’s magic.

Thank you for this useful add. More great information about tone mapping here –
https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/7630/what-is-tone-mapping-how-does-it-relate-to-hdr

Note though that tone mapping will not change the shadows patterns in the scene.

If this makes your scene too bright, you can use the tone mapping controls to modify the scene to the “desired” lighting value. Tone Mapping settings can also be changed mid-render.

Note that increasing /decreasing the apparent lighting level with tone mapping does not alter the actual lighting “values” that iray uses for the calculations.