The Rants of an Angry Game Dev Girl: Motion Blur

Cool looking image isn't it? Anyone out there interested on what can create something with this effect? Well I'm about to explain. Now Motion Blur is the effect responsible for the above image. I bet you are either wondering what Motion Blur is or thinking that you already know it, well in the blog I'm going to focus on Motion Blur in games and its significance.

Motion Blur is described as the streaking of rapidly moving objects in a image or a movie/animation, which is the result of a change in an image recording, either due to rapid movement or long exposure. Motion Blur has numerous applications in terms of aesthetics, from photography to animation to video games. Motion Blur is a type of artistic filter in computer graphics that converts images in order to stimulate the effect.Normally Motion Blur is not desirable in games however it can be used in certain instances it can be used to draw attention to specific areas of a scene.

In the above image its easy to see how motion blur is used to draw attention away from certain object while drawing attention to things like the gun. This is useful when there explosions in a scene since there are a number things happening in the scene because it helps to differentiate between everything going on, so that the player isn't confused or disoriented. Now this effect is used as an attempt to bring realism into the game just as lighting and shadows are.

Now my Professor often describes things as 'It's Just Three Lines of Code' and in this case he is completely accurate. To impliment motion blur in code you need these three lines of code placed right before your draw function in your main function:

//MOTION BLUR

glAccum(GL_MULT,q);

glAccum(GL_ACCUME,1-q);

glAccum9GL_RETURN,1.0);

The above code produces something close to the following: