On a general note, does anyone have any information (links/tutorials) on how to deal with antialiasing of highlights without affecting other details in an image (such as texture/bump detail or fine geometry such as the lettering on the coins bellow) ?
Thomas, I have not tested it but I have an idea. If you save your image in hdr format and you build two version of your image - one with normal brightness and one dimmed so that the brightest areas of the image are visible, than you could put this images as layers in photoshop. Now you select the critical areas in the dimmed image per “select color area” tool (I use the german version and dosn’t know the english name of the tool) from photoshop and adjust the edges in the normal layer per blur tools.
Thanks Micha, but I don’t know if this will work for me. For jewelry and glass object scenes that I have, each render can take 12 hours or more. I don’t think I want to do these twice.
The only reliable way is to save this out as a .hdr and use some post-processing program to convert the overbright areas to glows - similar to what a real camera does. If you don’t have one, I think I wrote a similar tool some time ago, I can try to dig it out. Unfortunately, there is no way to get both smooth AA, and HDR information - for theoretical reasons, not because of renderer limitations.
Like Vlado says, if you have the HDR format, than you can build your two image versions from this single rendering. You need only one rendering. My suggestion is a raw workflow only, but maybe you can refine it.
That would be a little hard to do; in any case, it would only be possible when rendering to a memory VFB (e.g. not when rendering directly to disk). Further on, being a pure post-rendering operation, it’s probably best to leave this to a separate program, so that you can adjust the glow without re-rendering. Or maybe it can be added as an additional color corrector for the VFB… we’ll see