Blender Tutorial

Blurry Objects - Motion Blur

There are two ways to accomplish blur in Blender: Vector Blur and Motion Blur. Read the Vector Blur before continuing.

Motion Blur for a static image follows the same general steps as Vector Blur. The main difference is that Motion Blur redraws the same scene over and over (with slight changes) to accumulate a very accurate representation of motion blur.

Setup

Repeat Vector Blur setup.

Objects in Motion

1. Press z to reveal wire frames.
2. Click RMB to select the UVsphere.
3. Press g then x then 2 then Enter to move the UVsphere away from the Bezier Curve.

   Otherwise the UVsphere would simply rotate about its axis, rather than "following" a path.

4. Click SHIFT-RMB to reselect the Bezier Curve.
5. Press CTRL-p.
6. Click Follow Path to make the Bezier Circle the parent path of the UVsphere.

   The Bezier Curve becomes the path around which the sphere will follow.

7. Click SR:2–Model and change it to 1–Animation.

   

8. Press F10 for the Scene buttons.
9. Click MBLUR.

   

   Animation View

10. Click RMB to select only the Bezier Circle.
11. Press F9.
12. Change PathLen: from 100 to 10.

    The path is a Bezier Circle. This controls the number of frames assigned to the selected path. For a circular path, a higher number means that the object encircling it will take smaller steps. A lower number means the object will take larger steps. To get some serious blur, pick a lower number. For more subtle blur, pick a higher number.

Render

Press F12 to render.

Motion Blur @ OSA 8; Motion Blur @ OSA 16

The UVsphere is drawn through a sequence that is rendered one frame at a time, up to 16 times.

The number of times is defined by the oversampling (OSA) level (Buttons Window, OSA). A higher OSA (e.g., 11 or 16) means more rendered images, which produces a better quality result. However, it takes more time to produce a final image.

Each frame for the image should be slightly different than the previous. If the moving object has not been told to move either far or fast enough, then it will hardly appear to have moved at all! Once Blender has finished rendering each of the images for the scene, it will merge them together.

Motion Blur (left) vs Vector Blur (right)

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