Aye, we all know there are all kinds of crazy techniques for smoothing out images, and increasing clarity. I'd like to pool some of them together and make some comparisons, for I've recently come across a very powerful tool for really speeding up my production time. It's a set of filters called Kai's Power Tools. KPT6 is the set in question, and the filter I'm using is called "KPT6 : Equalizer", and is basically a graphics equalizer for blurring pixel radii instead of for adjusting sound spectrums... First off is the non-aribtrary yeah-I-know-it-doesn't-prove-anything test. This scene I brought up awhile back while messing with lighting. The lighting quickly became too complex for my 'puter to handle. This scene took 31 hours to render, BEFORE reaching the single, regular-old AA pass. Cool part is, I like it without AA. The sad part is, there's only two lights in the scene, NO soft shadows, and only one of the lights is casting shadow. So why 30 hours for one scene? The reason is volumetric clarity. Sure, I could make streaks in Photoshop in ten seconds and have it look similar. But it's not the same! When you do it correctly, IN the scene, you get real inteeractive shadows. Something you can't get or reproduce in postwork... So I took a tree and placed it between the scene and the off-scene volume spotlight. This tree's leaves are what's breaking up the volumetric light into rays. Seems simple enough, but with this particular light there was massive artifacting even at 50% Volume Quality. So I cranked it up to 66%, and it got rid of the artifacts, but at a dreadful time-cost. Which led me back to Equalizer. There's no way you can convince me to let this stupid scene render for another 70 hours just to get an AA pass done! So we'll try a few workarounds and see what happens... Here's the render in question. 31 hours, regular AA but NO AA pass. 5.25M polys, 66.5MB scene file size. JPG compression in Riptide set to 20, meaning it is "lossless" in terms of detail (hopefully!).