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No Motion Blur on my shadows – I need them!
I’m working on a comp that has a lot of Illustrator files in it – all switched to 3D mode.
A light shines on the 3D layers to cast a shadow on a 3D (floor) layer.
I have a camera that pans across the Illustrator shapes quickly.The Motion blur for the illustrator shapes is fine, but…
there’s no motion blur on the shadows, so in a middle of a camera pan the shadow looks crisp where it should be as blurry as the element that casts it.
Is there a fix for this, or will I have to render out the floor separately with “shadows only” & Force Motion-Blur it?
INFO: Mac Pro (2008), AE V8.0.2.27. Colour Depth: 8bit. All switches for Motion Blur are on. Illustrator layers are set to Continually Rasterize. Shutter Angle = 180, Shutter Phase = 0, Samples Per Frame = 32 & Adaptive Sample Limit = 128. Shadow Map resolution is set to 2000.
Thanks for any help.
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2 Replies
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OK, so the problem is only when the camera is moving – and not the layers. I had never noticed that, but sure enough, there it is.
This is a pain in the arse solution because it will slow everything down, but it will work.
Add an adjustment layer to the top of the comp.
Add the force motion blur effect to the adjusment layer (effect > Time > CC Force motion Blur).
I did a tutorial on this effect (click on my head at the top of the forum) which explains how it works.
Oh! – Turn of motion blur for everything (layers, not just the comp’s blur) or it will add additional blur to some things already being blurred by the effect.
Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
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i’m not sure if this is worth the effort for just one quick scene, but if the rate (or speed) of the pan varies, you can save some render time by using and expression to link cc force motion blur’s blur samples to the ‘speed’ of the camera move. this can add more samples when needed and fewer or none when not needed and save a fair amount of render time, but ill take a little to set up…
if you want to give it a try (note you should probably turn the effect off for set up), just enable expressions for blur samples, then use the expression pickwhip to select the parameter that is keyframed for the pan (the rotation axis or position, etc). then add .speed to the end of it. if the blur samples value changes to zero, then the ‘speed’ is probably a negative value, just add * -1 to the end of the expression to fix.
now the value that pops up will probably not be a value you want, it could be in the hundreds of samples (hence why you want to hide the effect for set up). so no you just need to find and frame where there is a lot of motion and come up with a factor to reduce the samples. so if the speed value was returning 100, you will probably want the value to represent 10 samples, so add / 10 to the expression (if you had added a * -1 then just change that to / -10 or * -.1).
it may not be worth it for this project, but i have found this technique useful when i have used effects that don’t use ae’s native motion blur.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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