Is over-smoothing an expected behavior?

[pureexe]

Hi, thank you for creating RenderFormer — it’s an amazing piece of work!

I’ve been experimenting with the model and noticed a behavior that I’d like to clarify. When I introduce small perturbations to the diffuse component in the H5 file (see left column in the attached image), the RenderFormer output (right column) appears significantly smoother than expected.

In contrast, a standard Blender rendering (middle column) clearly shows these perturbations.

This makes me wonder:

• Is this smoothing behavior an expected characteristic of RenderFormer (e.g., due to learned priors or regularization)?
• Or is it possible that I’m misusing or under-representing the RenderFormer?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again for your work!

Data

• Perturbed H5 file: cbox_perturbed.h5
• Blend file (create from H5) : cbox_perturbed.blend

[pureexe]

As a follow-up to my previous observation, I have noticed that this over-smoothing behavior also extends to geometry perturbations.

By introducing geometric noise, at lower perturbation distances (0.001 to 0.005 Blender units), RenderFormer exhibits no visual change, whereas the Blender ground truth clearly reflects the physical distortions.

Even when the perturbation distance is scaled up significantly (0.01 to 0.05), the resulting geometry in RenderFormer remains heavily smoothed and fails to capture the high-frequency structural details present in the Blender render.

Could you confirm if this geometric over-smoothing is also an expected characteristic or limitation of the Renderformer?

Data for Reproducibility:

• Perturbed Geometry H5 file: H5 files

• Perturbed Geometry blend file: Blend files