Add a Blur node in Shader Editor
As simple as u heard. I think I dont need to describe the importance of it. Controling bumps, background blurring and lot more works reqiuire blurring images.
Instead of going to image editor what if we get a node to attatch next to the image/video node??!
5 Comments
It has been explained why this is not possible in the past. Basically shader is working on every pixel in the viewpor/render region. and blur has to calculate each pixel for every of its neighbors to find an average to blur. The amount of calculation is unrealistic.
Therefore technically it will never be possible. Practically it may be done with Compositor case, where the resolution is pre-defined and more limited. and Compositor do have blur functions for long. In the future it's possible to have "Shader Compositor" or "Compositor per material" as a part of NPR project. but details are not known. but at the end I don't think you are getting what you are thinking, but only something hopefully similar.
The OP was describing a blur specifically for imported images (textures), which do have a known "pre-defined" resolution, not for the entire shader or for objects in the scene as viewed through a camera or path tracing in the scene or whatever. It would effectively be a preprocessing step only for images.
E.G. it's absurd that if I want to have a gaussian smoothed environment texture for image based lighting with a custom node setup in the World section I have to edit the image in an external program such as Photoshop and create a blurred copy of the image and import that instead. The same is true for other object textures such as bumps, like the OP mentioned, or B&W masks, etc.
It's a much-requested feature for good reason. Having to destructive edits in external programs is an aggravating waste of time.
I don't remember where I heard this, probably during a Cartesian Caramel's live stream, but I've heard they want to start implementing some "Compositor" nodes in the shaders. It would be a completely new way of calculating the output, not just like importing a "blur" node and use it just like that, but it could eventually exist someday and it could completely change the way we build textures in Blender shader editor. And from what I've heard, this is not going to happen tomorrow, I'm not talking about NPR, but at least we know this is considered for the future of blender's development
Displacing the shader pixels by a white noise texture would work. And if it's only images or videos you need to blur, you can already do this by displacing the texture coordinates by a white noise texture.
Adding a blur directly in the shader editor isn't easy. But this limitation has been addressed as part of the NPR project See code.blender.org/2025/05/npr-project/ for more details, especially multi stage compositing.