Doc:Theory/Photography/Motion Blur

The Blur

A little backround info, if you will indulge me, to level set your perspective on blur. Three things: eyeball biology, film and CG:

Eyeballs: If you look into my eyeball, you will see (pun intended) that my brain processes about 15 images from each eye in parallel each second. My brain cognates those images together and I perceive motion by comparing the two. If something is moving fast enough, I percieve it to be a blur (either because my rods have some latency in reacting to light, or my brain, in overlaying and differencing the images, somehow merges them in a mix sort of fashion). The POINT IS, I percieve a motion blur.

Film: to keep us from seeing jumpy motion pictures, we simply doubled the frame rate to 30 frames per second (fps) (24 fps EU). So, the shutter is basically open for a 30th of a second and the film is exposed to the world for that length of time. As things moved in the real world during that time, the film exposure caused the image of the moving thing to be physically blurred or smeared on that frame. When developed and shown, we physically see an image that is blurred. The POINT IS, I see a blurred image.

CG: In CG, when a frame is rendered, the computer knows exactly where everything should be, and renders it as such. From frame to frame, an object is location A in frame 1, and location B in frame 2. When we show you these two frames at speed (30 fps), the image appears jumpy to us, because, somewhere between the eyeballs and the film, there isn't that same blurring as the real world and film, and we can tell.

So, how can we make a blurry CG image? Blender has two ways to achieve Motion blur in Blender:

Common Motion Blur

Slow, but produces better results.

Vector Blur

Blender specific Vector Blur. Faster but sometimes unwanted side-effects - which can be avoided though.