blur node for texture nodes
As in substance designer very useful and frequently used blur node make real awesome procedural texture , we need a natively blur node in blender :) . The problem is now in blender you can fake it with very noisy and it is not useful.
see the discussion:
blender.stackexchange.com/questions/9394/how-to-blur-a-texture-node-in-cycles-material
substance designer example how use blur node:
This idea was marked as a duplicate of Cycles Cache/Blur node.
11 Comments
Reason that there is no blur node is that there is no god way of implementing that in current cycles node system. BF would have to introduce completely new system to Blender of generating textures at all. In cycles nodes are calculated on runtime (if ray hits surface, then values of roughness, colour etc. are calculated using nodes). In designer final output is texture, and each step is cached and operations such as blur are possible to implement in reasonable way (like several ns per node).
To create native blur you would have to implement Designer inside Blender or rocket up render-time several times.
please edit your proposal and include a timecode in the Substance Designer video. This is a hour and a half long tutorial and no one has time to search through it.
@Caetano Veyssières:
first time to use blur in 2:20 and second 13:44 in video but use it frequently in all process, for example if need blending two procedural textures or blurring edges. if you don't have much time to see the all video , just switch to 2x speed in yt setup and see the awesome workflow. Shortly: without blur node not possible create realistic look procedural texture.
@blendswap001: Ok, Now I see what I expected. He's using a 2D Blur. Textures in Blender are 3D and blurring a 3D procedural texture is a whole other ball game. In fact I've never seen such a thing in any program and I'm not sure it's possible to develop a more computationally efficient method than the "noise workaround". However, I'm not a developer and I may be wrong, so you're right to ask.
More than that, you could be more specific in your request :
In Blender, procedural textures are 3 dimensional, even if you apply them on a UV map. So how about developing purely 2D versions of those textures so we could have a blur node that could be used on them ?
And to make things easier, instead of having every texture node doubled in the Add menu (for the 2D and 3D versions), we could keep a single texture node for both versions, but this node would have a clickable switch to chose between the 2D or the 3D version, thus keeping the node editor as clean as it currently is.
@Caetano Veyssières: good idea, yes maybe if we have a button on header panel to switch 2d/3d button, and setup the generated texture size (2048x2048 for example) and then in add->converter->blur node appearing or any other 2d filter. Finally, will be a 2d image texture.
@blendswap001: I wasn't thinking of pixelated textures. That you can already do in the compositor. I was thinking of blurring the procedural texture directly, although now that I think of it, I don't know if even that is possible.
@blendswap001:
Can you show me your result ?
Blurring a checker with the exact same values given in the stackexchange page you linked, the result is as clean as it gets (click to enlarge) :
I enabled the Cycles denoiser but with a higher noise scale you get the exact same result without denoising.
@Caetano Veyssières: very high noise is very slow, and i want to use blur only one node and than later mixing/blending an other procedural texture, i don't want to blur every node.
youtube.com/watch
Or just use a colormix/overlay instead of vector curves
@: Hello, Can you explain a bit more how use color mix/overlay for not noisy burl effect ? :)
@blendswap001: forget it! i use to use a mix node set to overlay, texture coordinates in the upper slot and noise (RGB) in the lower. But it works only for UV coords. The technique in the video works way better