MayaMan Motion Blur

The motion blur panel in the MayaMan Globals dialog controls renderman motion blur parameters.

Linear Blur

When this mode is enabled the geometry and transformation information is only sampled on even frame boundaries. This may result in faster rib gen and less disk space used. When enabled the GUI changes to a simplified form of the regular motion blur controls.

Enable Blur

You can enable or disable Motion, Vertex and Camera blur using the three checkboxes in this dialog. Motion blur can occur when objects move past the camera. Vertex blur can occur when an object is quickly deforming. Vertex blur also controls the blurring of particles. Camera blur occurs when the camera is moving quickly, and blurs all objects in the scene.

Motion Blur Amount

These parameters control the amount of blur applied to objects. 100% will show an object blurring between its position in neighbouring frames, while 200% will blur twice as much, looking at the difference in object positions between the current frame and two frames away.

Number of Segments

Normally objects are blurred linearly between their start and end positions. However, using this parameter, objects can be sampled in multiple positions and blurred between them. This is useful for objects moving in an arc, such as a helicopter rotor blade, so that it blurs in a smooth curve rather than in linear segments.

Direction

Motion blur can blur objects between their position at the current and previous frame ('Backward') the current and next frame ('Forward') or half-way in either direction ('Centered'). For forward and backward motion blur modes the shadow will always be produced at the frame's time so authors of procedurals should now emit their time samples for backward motion blur in reverse order so that shadow application occurs properly.

Motion Blur Shadows and Reflections

This option will put the "motionrays" attribute into the RIB file just after WorldBegin. When both motion blur (above) and this option are enabled, then reflections and shadows of motion blurred objects will too render with motion blur.

To improve the quality of motion blurred shadows and reflections you will have to increase the no of samples used: The no of samples used for reflections can be found in the MayaMan Material Attributes (Reflection Samples). The no of samples used for shadows can be found in the Maya Light Shape Attributes (Shadow Rays).

Note that this attribute (motionrays) can be overridden at several levels, namely in the Global Options (here), in the MayaMan Material Attributes, and in the MayaMan Model Attributes.

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