I was looking up different blurring methods on wikipedia. gaussian is a very common one included in cycles’ film settings and it is included in the compositor as a type of blurring method for post processing; however, this method smooths the image uniformly and destroys details that are larger than the blur radius/standard deviation. Anisotropic diffusion is one common blurring method to smooth surfaces while preserving certain important details like edges and small details. I understand that this method takes more time because the computer is doing more calculations than it has to with a normal gaussian or box blur. I was wondering if there has ever been an integrated anisotropic diffusion filter in the cycles film settings or if it is possible to achieve this effect within the compositor because I feel it would speed up the process of people having difficulty with noisy renders without just blurring the entire image
Nah the blur types (resamples) are baked in. There was a push to get a better sampler, the Cubic B-spline but it never took off 