Post effects
Screen-space effects that polish the rendered image — bloom, depth of field, motion blur, anti-aliasing, outlines, auto-exposure, and the lighting effects that read the whole frame.
Once the renderer has lit your scene, a chain of post effects runs over the finished image to add the cinematic touches a camera lens and film stock would give you. Most are toggles you turn on; each one only costs you GPU time when it is switched on.
These effects work on the rendered picture as a whole, so they sit downstream of your lights and materials. Reach for them last, once the scene already looks right.
The lens and camera effects
These mimic how a real camera sees light.
Bloom — bright areas bleed a soft glow into their surroundings. Great for neon, highlights, and anything emissive. Drive it from your scene's brightest values rather than faking it with a blur.
Depth of field — throws the foreground or background out of focus, so a chosen distance stays sharp. Use it to draw the eye and add a sense of scale.
Motion blur — smears moving things along their direction of travel. On a flat image it blends several moments in time across a shutter window; on a real 3D object it reads each object's actual on-screen movement and smears along it, so a fast object stays crisp where it isn't moving and the object behind shows through its blurred edge.
Auto-exposure — automatically brightens or darkens the whole frame so the image stays well-exposed as your scene's lighting changes, the way your eyes adjust walking into a dark room.
Motion blur lives on the render.rasterize Blur node's Motion Blur mode as well as in the post chain. For full-scene smear, the post-effect version is what you want. For blurring one specific object, see Rasterizing.
Anti-aliasing (TAA)
Stair-stepped, jaggy edges are smoothed away by anti-aliasing. DNA uses a temporal method (TAA): it gently blends a little of the previous frame into the current one, averaging out the rough edges over time.
This gives very clean edges in motion, which is why it is the default. It needs to know how things are moving on screen, so it shares that movement information with motion blur.
Because TAA blends across frames, a completely frozen, super-fine pattern can shimmer slightly on the very first frame before it settles. In normal animated use you won't notice it.
Outline
The Outline effect draws lines around your objects — perfect for a stylised, illustrated, or technical look. It detects edges in the rendered scene and strokes them, so it works on whatever geometry you feed the renderer without any extra setup.
Lighting effects that read the whole frame
A few effects aren't just cosmetic — they add realism by letting light interact across the image after the main lighting pass.
Ambient occlusion — softly darkens creases, contact points, and tight corners where light struggles to reach. It grounds objects and adds depth for very little cost.
Screen-space reflections — surfaces reflect the rest of the visible scene, so a glossy floor picks up the objects standing on it.
Screen-space global illumination — bounced, indirect light: colour and brightness spill from one surface onto nearby ones, the way a red wall casts a warm tint on a white floor.
Caustics and refraction — light bending and focusing through transparent things like glass, water, and liquid, including the bright focused patterns caustics create.
"Screen-space" means these effects only know about what is currently on screen. Something just outside the frame, or hidden behind another object, can't be reflected or bounce light, because the renderer has nothing to read there. This is normal and expected — it's the trade-off that keeps them fast enough to run live.
Turning them on
Post effects are configured as part of your render setup rather than wired in as separate nodes — turn each one on where you control the camera and renderer (render.render). An effect that is off costs nothing, so leave the ones you aren't using switched off to keep playback fast.
To temporarily disable any node feeding the picture, use Bypass rather than deleting it.