Gaussian blur shader?

[danjay]

I'm trying to create a shader which will simulate photoshop's gaussian blur filter applied to a 3D object. My ultimate goal is to create an object, a long cylinder for example, which will be sharp and solid on one end, and then gradually trail off into a sort of fuzzy cloud. (Still image, not animation). So far, the best solution I could come up with is to take a blinn, connect a vertical ramp to it's transparency node, and then connect a samplerinfo utility to the ramp. The facingratio of the samplerinfo utility connects to the ramp vcoord. I can further modify the shader by first adding a multiply/divide utility to the original blinn's transparency node, and then branching off to a regular verticle ramp at one imput and the ramp plus samplerinfo described above on the other. It's still kind of tricky to get the effect I'm looking for. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

On a related note, at the recent 3December event, I saw a preview of cloud/water/fire features which will be available in upcoming versions. I forgot what they were called, but they looked pretty awesome.

[wcy93]

you might be able to simulate something like that with the soft reflection plugin (which I believe can be used for soft refractions as well).

although, it would probably be a lot easier to do it in post. render out an object matte, and then a depth pass for the same object.

[goli]

I'm not really a texture guy, but I'm wondering if there's some way to use the Bump and Bump Filter nodes for this. From what I can recall, the filter controls the occurrance of blurriness based on distance and camera angle (right?).

[stevesayer]

Could you achieve this effect using depth-of-field? If you want it to be blurred as it gets closer to or farther from the camera, that could work. But if you want it to be blurred along the camera plane... your best bet is maybe to do it in post. It's just a still image, right?

Good luck,

-Steve