I was quite surprised how much the choice of anti-aliaser affects a render. Here I’ve rendered a scene with all the 3DS anti-aliasers, to compare how they fare. The scene is a ring (which you might wear on a finger), using Neil Blevins beautiful gold material. The subject is 5 intersecting toruses, scanline renderer, with an HDR skylight based on Desk_Sm_Blurry.hdr. I discovered that all the anti-aliasers are very susceptible to the radiosity quality, there is a huge difference in the artifacts between the 85% default and 99% radiosity that I used.
Area, nice at first glance, but a bit cartoony
Blend, not suitable for this kind of texture
Blackman, a little blurry but quite realistic
Catmull-Rom. Convincing, but a little too much
Cook Variable. Very crisp in the highlights, a bit blurred elsewhere
Cubic. Poor unlit areas
Mitchell-Natravali. Crisp compromise, my favourite
Quadratic. A little surrealist and over-smoothed
Sharp Quadratic. A little better than the basic quadratic, but still too smoothed
