Material Blur without uv's

agents107

I am using a material effect that creates a outline of all objects but the line is highly aliased and would like to blur the outline it's self. I know how to create a blur in the material editor but that edits uv's and i want to blur from a constant clamp and not a texture sample. Is this possible?

JordanW

How are you creating the blur? Is it a post process? What's going on? Keep in mind there's usually 2 ways to "Blur" something, if it's an image you're going to have to do multiple samples (Shift uvs like 5 times and blend) or if it's a function you'll have to figure out an analytical way to soften it.

rasmus

Images would be nice!

agents107

Alright a better explination:
Current looks like this:


As you can see it needs so AA.
so the current material


And what comes out of the constant clamp is what needs to be blurred
This is what comes out of the clamp:

and the setup to get that image:

Hope that explains it a bit better.
I need some ideas as how to blur the clamp because it isn't an image.

Lamont

Take the clamp output and use depth to soften the edges? Or do a 50% opacity line that's slightly thicker and multiply that over the RGB output, and then take the 100% opaque line that's a tad smaller than the 50% one and put that on top of everything?

agents107

Do you mean a depth biased blend and if so what would my alpha rgb and bias inputs be. i have never used that node before. Thanks for your help.

Neox

the only way i know of is like lamont already said, render 2 or more outlines with different thickness and multiply them

Oniram

from dave prout @ eat3d when i had sort of the same issue

It's also possible to vary the line width based upon scene depth, so you can get thinner lines in the distance vs. up close (to keep the image from flattening out and looking too cartoonish).
To do this, try duplicating your shader tree and setting a "fat" line for the original and a "skinny" line for the duplicate, and Lerp them using a SceneDepth node

Neox

and now we are getting where it gets more expensive, as you have to blur the scene tweice for the outline and again twice or more for the blur + its getting prett annyoing to handle so many nodes in one tree, without grouping and beeing able to close finished groups you don't want to touch anymore

agents107

Thank you everyone for all the great suggestions i will post up the different techniques and what they achieved performance and visual wise in the next few days.I am very grateful for the help.