How to add motion blur in maya. - Tutorial

Hi guys,

Here's a quick tutorial for adding motion blur in maya, its a quick and easy feature to add that will increase the production value and aesthetic appeal of your animations. But be warned it isn't a quick render, add this and you'll be adding several minutes to each frames render times.

So before I give you the easy way to add motion blur let me mention the quickest way. For a faster way to add motion blur you can render your animation with a mib_motion_vector pass and if you have nuke you can use this pass straight away to add convincing motion blur in a lot less time. If you're an after effects user you can do the same but you'll need to pay out for this very useful plugin Reel Smart Motion Blur as far as pluig-ins go its not too expensive either. To make use of a mib_motion_vector_pass I can't recommend a better after effects motion blur tutorial than this one.

But for those of us who are students and hobbyists with less money to part with heres the way to do it out of maya.

First off this isnt difficult so to activate it go into your render globals and select it in the roll out as shown above. Your options are motion blur off, no deformation and full. If you are just animating a camera or a static non deforming object like a vehicle then non deformable will do a fairly good job and not take quite so long to render. For anything thats been skinned etc so characters and such you will need to choose full.

Next you need to select your renderable camera do this in the View tab of your camera view. Then press ctrl-a to bring up the camera attributes.

In the camera attributes find the special effects rollout and this is where you can change the shutter angle, the shutter angle in combination with the speed of movement is what effects the amount of blur the animation displays. For a blur close to that of a film camera set it to 180.

So thats it, render it now and it looks beautifully blurred and much more appealing. But as a word of warning make sure you make a selection of test renders from across your shot, make sure your motion blur is right for the look you want before you let it batch render for seven hours.