In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to generate realistic motion blur in Blender Cycles!
Motion blur is an effect you see in any real video. If you have footage recorded of yourself running past the camera or doing something really quick, playback the video and pause right in the middle of you doing that. You’ll likely see a lot of blurring. Even in movies you see this effect a lot. Sometimes movies use motion blurring as an effect. Like in that Batman car chase scene, motion blurring is used in the background to portray a great sense of speed.
By incorporating motion blurring in your 3D animation renders, you will make your scenes look more realistic. I don’t know why but for some reason, if there is no motion blur in renders, our eyes tend to register them as fake. So it’s best to use motion blurring if you want to go for a realistic-looking animation (and perhaps also for a stylized effect). It’s subtle but it contributes a lot.
You can achieve motion blurring in the Cycles rendering engine in Blender. Here’s a fact: It’s really easy! It’s not like the old days of the Blender Internal render engine, where you had to use Compositing nodes and fake it in post-production or something. Motion blur in Blender is simple now!
Here’s how to do it:
- You first need to have an animated scene loaded in Blender. Load that up!
- Go to the Render tab in the Properties window.
- Enable the Motion Blur by clicking the box.
- Change sampling accordingly. Changing this will control whether you have more motion blur in your scene or less. I tend to stick with something like 1.0 for realism. This means the motion blurring will calculate over 1 frame.
Note: Motion blur in Blender does add a lot to the render times so it is best used if you really need the realism. The more motion blurring that is required, the longer you will have to wait (some cases hours/frame).
That’s really it! That’s all there is to achieving Motion Blur in Blender! I hope this tutorial has been useful to you and thank you for reading!
