How to Blur Anything in Blender's Shader Editor

If you've ever wanted to soften or blur a material in Blender, you've probably noticed there's no node for it built into blender. So, in this tutorial, I'll show you a simple node setup to blur anything in Blender's shader editor.
If you found this tutorial useful, consider supporting me on Patreon!
patreon.com/ltfilm
0:00 Intro
0:36 Linear gradient
3:13 vs. Gradient Texture node
6:57 Using other textures
9:28 Image textures
10:46 Blur direction
12:12 Quick outro

[@StellaByLuna]

This is great! It also works really well if you plug in an image texture instead of the noise, I tried it with a halftone texture and it worked incredibly well, though I had to mix in an inverted version of the texture with slightly offset coordinates to get the full effect to work

[@ltfilm]

That’s interesting! I hadn’t considered doing that before, but glad you got it to work!

[@stevenlitvintchouk3131]

Excellent! There are just so many materials where you want the texture to be blurred at least slightly. Just what I needed!

[@ltfilm]

Glad it helped!

[@heckensteiner4713]

Crazy how Geometry Nodes now has a Blur Attribute node, but the Shader Editor still doesn't! It would save me a lot of time eyeballing things in photoshop and sending it back to Blender. But this is a great alternative. Thanks!

[@ltfilm]

Yeah, I’m amazed there isn’t a blur node either. But glad this workaround helps you!

[@OGPatriot03]

Thank you, this is an awesome trick that's useful for me in all sorts of scenarios! (At first I accidentally used the value output of the white noise texture rather than color and got discombobulated results, but after switching to color as shown it just works perfectly like I would expect a blur node would, fantastic!)

[@ltfilm]

Glad it helped!

[@blanchsb]

Nice video. One thing you can do at the end of the video is simply duplicate the mapping node and leave the X/Y/Z untouched so that the blur doesn't blur in a particular direction

[@rhomis]

Thanks!

[@simonsaysgray]

thanks for the video! helped me a lot!

[@ltfilm]

Glad it helped!

[@EmilyRudnick]

Is there a way to blur edges via this method or something similar?

[@Songbearer]

Fantastic! You saved my flamethrower from being a lamethrower!

[@ltfilm]

I'd love to hear how that happened because I can't figure out how these two things are connected!

[@kjj735]

This is cool thank you m8

[@ltfilm]

Glad it could help!

[@CapVFX]

Great video! Can I use this method to blur out a bump map normal?

[@ltfilm]

Yes, I believe you can use it for bump mapping. But not for displacement. It gives really weird results if you do that, so make sure you don’t mix them up!

[@legenda_co]

Great tutorial! Removed a previous comment of mine. Anyone following along, double check your mapping coordinates! I started off without a 1:1 scale, which sent me chasing my tail for awhile.

[@ltfilm]

Good point, mapping coordinates is an entirely different beast to get into!

[@globglob3d]

You are only "visually" blurring, but what you do is actually moving pixels around instead of interpolating between colors (which is what proper blurring actually do). It's fine for some cases but for mine it was not unfortunately.

[@ltfilm]

You're absolutely right! In the absence of a proper blurring function, this is the closest we can get. However, since the white noise node scales infinitely and is treated as a continuous function, any changes it made to the image texture will always be at a subpixel level, so should never be visible. So, I'm curious what sort of workload you're doing where this method wouldn't work for you?

[@globglob3d]

@@ltfilm try using a color ramp after your setup to tweak the values and you'd be left with no change whatsoever (if the image input has pixels of either 1 or 0 values). But there is a fix. What you do is basically repeat the setup multiple times with different noise seed (just change the scale slightly since there is no seed input) and average them (mix them together). Then you actually get a gradient. More computationally intensive but you get a proper blur :)

[@globglob3d]

@@ltfilm to answer your question: I'm making a procedural tile generator using the brick node as the main mask, which output a black and white texture. I wanted a gradient slope between tiles hence the need for blurring.

[@ltfilm]

That's an interesting suggestion! I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about having no effect with a color ramp or how repeating the setup creates a different result. But, when I used this method on a brick texture as a mask for an image texture, it worked perfectly fine as a gradient between the tiles. But, if it doesn't work for you, then your setup is probably very particular about how the blurring is implemented!

[@globglob3d]

@@ltfilm my issue was mostly due to the fact I'm using the black and white mask to generate a normal map. Since the colors on a normal map represents directional vectors the gradient has to be an actual gradient otherwise the normal map doesn't work as it should.