VrayLanczosFilter and VraySincFilter

[crazy homeless guy]

...anyone have info on the Vray AA filters? ....are they sharpening or softening filters? ...do they render faster than standard AA filters? ...etc.

[vlado]

The sinc filter is a sharpening filter, while the lanczos one is a smoothing filter. They are neither particularly faster nor slower than the standard filters, but may look somewhat better (although this is very subjective).

Best regards,
Vlado

[Pixelab]

Do you still advice to "Avoid using sharpening AA filters. They can make the noise more apparent" when using "universal" vRay settings ? for example Sinc one ?

[vlado]

Of course; there is nothing to be done about this - after all, the exact purpose of sharpening filters is to bring out the color transitions (noise included).

Best regards,
Vlado

[Shimakaze]

Which filter to use depends a lot on what kind of picture you're rendering. for instance doing something like architectural viz you'd usually want to use a sharp filter and sometimes even edge enhanced (though I don't recommend that) however if you were to go for a natural look then a smoother one is better. Also if you are doing animation you will get much more flickering when using a sharp filter. I usually use the VRaySincFilter but it's just a taste thing

[cpnichols]

Sharpening filters also have a nasty habit of causing serious edge artifact when you have bright areas like a high reflections of a light source or sun next to a darker area. This was not an issue before real world lighting. However, because in Vray everything is rendered in float (with 0 being black and 1 being white) the bright area could be a value of 5 and the dark 0.02. The sharpening filter will get you an "error" at that edge actually giving
you negative values basically looking like a nasty black edge.

This can actually be avoided by using a smoothing filter and, if sharpeing is needed... do it in post.