I was watching some of the videos on the Creature Factory DVD (UPDATE: I guess you can’t buy this DVD anymore? It’s unfortunate because it contained a lot of good info) I bought from the Blender e-shop.
The DVD is essentially a a walkthrough of how creator Andreas Goralczyk made a short video from start to finish all in Blender. I’ll do a more thorough review of it later, but I just wanted to post on one of the little golden nuggets of info I picked up while watching.
Andreas mentions that he does not use the default render filter in Blender, which is set to “Gauss“. I didn’t even realize there were different filters until I heard him say that.
I had just posted my sword project recently, so since I had it ready at hand, I decided to do a couple of tests. To get to the filter, you go to the Scene tab (press F10). The filters pulldown menu is circled in red:
The scene tab with render filter circled.
In the video, Andreas mentions using the “Mitch” or “Catrom” filters. First I rendered the sword using the default Gauss (as I have been doing for years now):
Sword rendered with Gauss filter (click to see larger)
Previously this has always been ok, if not excellent, to my eyes. Next I switched the filter to Mitch:
Sword rendered with Mitch filter (click to see larger)
As you can see, it’s much sharper and crisp. I really liked this one, but still I decided to do a Catrom:
Sword rendered with Catrom filter (click to see larger)
And this one is even more crisp than the Mitch filter. I have now changed my default filter to Catrom (by saving my default setting from the File menu). Sure there may be occasions where you will need a softer render, but you can always switch it back at that point.
Anyway, I’d recommend playing around with it and seeing how it affects your renders.
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