Having trouble blurring a texture using shaders

Question

Currently I'm using the following shader in a ColorRect that's over top of my Sprite to blur said Sprite:

shader_type canvas_item;

uniform float blur_amount = 2.0;

void fragment()
    {
    COLOR = textureLod(SCREEN_TEXTURE, SCREEN_UV, blur_amount);
    }

I'd prefer to simply use a shader attached to the Sprite itself to blur it. I tried using a modified version of the previous code;

shader_type canvas_item;

uniform float blur_amount = 2.0;

void fragment()
    {
    COLOR = textureLod(TEXTURE, UV, blur_amount);
    }

but nothing changes. Obviously I'm misunderstanding something here, if someone could fill me in I'd appreciate it.

Answer 1

textureLod() will work, but you must import your texture with "Mipmaps" enabled.

Comments

textureLod() is slow in android, Is there any alternative?

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You could look at the example in https://github.com/godotengine/godot-demo-projects

It uses an averaging of the pixels within a certain radius. The shader can be found here.