Defining and Rendering Motion Blur

Motion blur is active for the scene by default. To view the motion blur of objects in a scene, activate the motion blur setting in the Render Region Options Property Editor. To render the motion blur, activate the motion blur setting in the Render Pass Property Editor. As long as these options are on and you have a moving object in your scene, the motion blur is visible and rendered. After that, you can tweak the timing and quality of the blur effect with the various motion blur settings discussed in this section.

It is important to note that the Scene Motion Blur Settings are the primary parameters for defining the motion blur effect. In particular, the Speed and Offset options are used to specify the shutter interval during which the geometry's motion is evaluated for each frame. This motion data is then pushed to the renderer. For more information, see Specifying the Shutter Interval.

If your renderer is mental ray (it is by default), you can use the mental ray Shutter and Delay options to further modify the size and length of the motion blur trails (without re-evaluating the geometry and its motion data). Do not use the mental ray Shutter and Delay options to define the motion blur, these options should only be used for tweaking the motion blur trails. For more information, see the mental ray Shutter Settings.

You can also create motion blur for a specific object in a scene by assigning it a motion blur property. This is useful when you want to force motion blur off for a given object, or if you want to optimize rendering performance by setting the more render-intensive deformation blur only for a specific object. This is discussed in Creating a Motion Blur Property.