Sharper rendering with blender ?

Hi

It’s two things that annoys me about rendering with the internal renderer of blender. Is there any way of improving the following:

  1. The image produces is always somewhat blurred. I actually find the preview window doing a slighly better job here. With yafray I usually get much sharper and crisper images. Can this be improved?

  2. The image is also somewhat pale (again compared with yafray). I guess it blend in some of it’s ambient colors here. Okay, I know how to use nodes to remedy this, but is there other ways of fixing this? (I might be using wrong types of lights perhaps?)

I might be doing something wrong here, and thats why I turn to you folks. I want to start using the blender renderer with all it’s new functions. Any suggestions?

  1. turn down OSA to 5, or off http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Oversampling_%28Antialiasing%29

  2. ambient makes stuff look “flatter” by increasing light in shadows. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Ambient_Light. By default, a material is .5 affected by ambient light, but world ambient light color/intensity is 0. It does not make images look blurry.

2a) if the colors are not Vivid, the diffuse shader should be turned up. By default it is 80% saturation, meaning that only 80% of the material’s color is reflected back. Different shaders have a dramatic effect on how the color is computed. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Diffuse_Shaders

2c) lighting is the most important aspect, as it controls what is actually shone. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Lighting

  1. There was a thread here awhile back regarding different renderers from the same white sofa hardwood floor scene, and careful placement of ambient lights made it look the same/better as Yafray, and photo-realistic.

My suggestion is to spend a LOT of time reading what I’ve given here, and playing cause and effect for a day or two to understand what is going on.

Hi!
In the Render panel there is a Filter slider. You can select the filtering method and adjust the value from 0 to 1.5.
As the default value is 1.0, you can decrease the value and get more crispy renderings.
Philippe.

Use a different reconstruction filter thn Gaussian. For some bizarre reason it’s on by default, and tends to make everything look softened. Mitch is a lot better, give it a try.

Thanks for the advices. The antialising is the reason for blurry images. I will experiment a bit here.

yes definitly chose a different AA mode as well as decrease the kernel size to 0.5 (the sharpest possible)

Actually the catmull-rom and mitchell-netravali filters have built-in sharpening effects, which get stronger as you raise the filter size. So you can try that as well.

Take a look at the release log: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-240/samples-and-filtering/
Any filter with an indentation that goes below the x-axis has a sharpen effect (it negates the color of the neighbouring pixels)