Moho Forum

I know that in an anime studio layers there is a motion blue tab, and as helpful as its been, all it does it is take the last few frames and shows them with less alpha. In flash, at least when I used to animate there before I bought AS, you could activate a blur function in the x or y dimension. Then you could copy a non-blurred version and put those two together, and wal-lah! you get a good looking motoin blur. When I use motion blues, Most of the time the animation is moving too fast and the blur looks too cheesy. Is there any other way to blur the animations so it looks better, or do you have to export the animation as an image sequence (such as JPEG or PNG) and then manually blur the certain images in a programs such as adobe photoshop?

try increasing your frame rate so the objects are closer together

AS does not have a "real" motion blur. It is how you described it. Some people using AS will add the motion blur using another application in post.

You can try to "fake" a motion blur using fill effects or layer blurring but it you want a "true" motion blur you need to do this after you render from AS using some other post editing application.

-vern

It highly depends on what effect you want to achieve.

"Motion blur" normally is used in CGI to mimick an analogue camera's behaviour to "smear" fast moving objects, thus creating a bigger overlap from frame to frame and reduce staggering.

In drawn animation you normally wouldn't apply "motion blur" to everything - it gives a weird effect. But for very fast movements (in fact faster than reality) you have two options:

1. Ghost images. This is an old trick, basically you put more than one drawing into one frame.
2. Smears. Especially in "classical" Hollywood cartoons you'll find a lot of drybrush applied in fast movements.

Both methods can be used in AS, most easily with images made in Photoshop, then put into a switch layer and shown when needed. I prefer the handmade ones over any automatically generated version.

Ok, wait. First, to TheChewanater, nice advice, but the motion blurs of AS Pro still look a bit cheesy, and don't acheive the best quality or the best ratings from any viewers. To heyvern, Nice advice, but after some reasearch a person told me about that idea, but I'm still decoding his message (he changed the points to make the clone animation look wider than the original, but still look right, then added a blur effect and changed the line to soft edge). And to Slowtiger you're two ideas sound good, but the first one sounds to hard, and can already be achieved by AS Pro's normal motion blur effect. The second idea is what I want to acheive; the smudgy motion blur.

Thank you all for answering so quickly. I just wish someone made a decent tutorial to making the important stuff in anime studio, like a body turn using point animation and layer ordering (such as greykid's animations) and to adding cool effects. Oh well, I guess we can't have everything...

When I need to create a really large motion blur, I create it in Photoshop like this:

- copy the element in motion
- paste it and elongate it (at least 300 %)
- erase excess stuff with a soft brush
- adjust opacity
- set this "blur" to "lighten"

Maybe you find some of this useful.

As slowtiger has indicated a motion blur is just a "frame" or two that is "burred" in the direction of motion. You see this A LOT in flash stuff with moving text. You blur one or two frames of the moving text and it creates the illusion of many frames of motion. I have done this with animated GIFs. A teeny tiny GIF animation with only 5 or 6 frames looks like it is ten times that much. The blurred image or text makes it look like many more frames.

The same can be done in AS. Just render out the frame/s you want to create the motion and use a motion blur on them using an image editor and place them back in to AS. Translate them over however many frames to create the effect you need. You can even do this with "parts" of elements in AS (like an arm or legs or a fast moving object). The key is the motion "trail" that is why simple "blurring" won't always give the same effect.

Using some kind of post processing software is sometimes preferred to do this. It is much faster and easier. I honestly don't use motion blur that much with 2D in AS... yet.

Slowtiger's second option is to draw the "zoom" or motion effect in AS. Instead of a "literal" blurring effect you draw lines of motion. Maybe removing portions of the image or hiding them... or doubling the lines to indicate rapid motion (strobing). distorting if needed. The key is to create the illusion of extreme motion over a few short frames.

With motion blur and "zoom" lines, they are not on the screen very long. They are there to fool the eye for a brief moment.

-vern