[Bf-funboard] AO improvements and Nodes

[Carsten Wartmann]

Hi,

I was just playing a bit with Ambient Occlusion. However it does not 
please my eyes very much, even with 16 samples, I hate noise ;-)

So I tought: "Blur the AO pass and multiply it over the Diffuse/Spec Pass"

That worked, but the blurring made a little "halo" over the image. I 
tried all blurring filters, found "Quad" to fit best.

Then I tried GIMP and used "Selective Gaussian Blur" which tries to keep 
the edges intact, and was quite pleased with the non-noisy but still AO 
like image.

Then I tried "despeckle" which worked even better after some 
adjustments. Even with only 5 AO passes it looks nice. There are even 
better denoise algorithms "in the wild", I use an app called Noiseware 
and it produces automatically very clean images, which cost many 
tweaking with GIMP. And I need to use it often because I own a 10MP 
camera ;-)

So I started dreaming:

- Include a blurring filter (try to keep the edges intact) into the AO 
process, maybe it would be possible to detect where a edge is from 
Z-channel or so to enhance the edge detection

- Add selective gaussian blur and/or despeckle to the Nodes

- Make the use of GIMP Plugins in the NodeEditor possible


Just some crazy ideas,
Carsten