It’s not at all offending anyone in particular. It’s just saying that there will always be people who will find things to complain about (now don’t say “but intrr is best in that respect!”), or new ways to measure the level of ‘professionality’ of an application.
This whole “grainy” discussion is getting a bit pointless. If you want a grainy picture, use an image manipulation program. It’s simply outside the scope of Blender - as much as (for my taste) encoding individual frames to MPEG and multiplexing audio and video.
And it’s TOTALLY pointless to use a completely different lighting algorithm (AO) which takes ages to render to achieve an otherwise totally unrelated effect (grainyness).
itrrrrrrr - I think that what was going on with his friend is that a common thread that he had seen in images generated in other renderers which used a raytraced global illumination solution was a certain amount of grain. Being a layman, all he knew was that the images looked realistic, and they had a certain amount of graininess to them. What his friend was really asking, then, when he mentioned graininess was “Can Blender do that thing that makes it look kind of real?”
The answer, now, is yes, it can. And sometimes you may want to add a subtle amount of grain to an image in order to add one more scale of visual interest.
Please take Thumper’s mom’s advice. Stop being so condescending.
using an ao technic has one big advantage compared to other technics. ao is not uniform. depending of the scene the grain is different. that was actualy what i kept in mind. and as far as i know there was a quick movie lately with displacement and AO. it all looked pretty experimental and many loved it.
sure rendertime gets higher but the result was pretty neat. the displacment node in blender is manly crap when you compare it to displacment in renderman but it worked perfect in the movie.
but well in some way you are right. this question might have been a bit strange. grain as a high end feature. but everybody starts small.
is what i do for grain in blender is to add a plane right up in front of the camera, add a cloud texture and set the noisesize to 0, turn alpha to 0… etc etc
i used the "put a plane in front of the camera method that blendergetic said to use.