I’ve not seen an actual blur node in the material editor, is that because there isn’t one ? All I want to do is soften the sphere mask as it’s 0 hardness is too hard.
There are some material blur options, but not to do what you are wanting. You can blur textures using SpiralBlur-Texture and you can blur the scene using SpiralBlur-SceneTexture, but there isn’t currently a function to blur other functions.
it shouldn’t really be necessary to blur a spheremask though. you can just give it an exponential gradient. try using RadialGradientExponential instead of spheremask.
Would a function to blur other functions even be possible without making a render target first? It would be handy in a few cases but I can’t think of any way to do it.
Actually it is possible its just a bit of a mess with a standard node network because you need to have multiple copies of the function.
This is how you would perform 4 offset sample blur. better way is to do it programmatically using the custom node, but that requires writing the function to be evaluated inside of the custom node as well.
Interesting that there are other methods but not a single blur node.