There is a scene in Fight Club that has a breakdown you can view here, it is a bullet time sequence done entirely in CGI that features a very original simulation of a slow shutter speed that you would get in an actual camera for a photo. I have obtained the actual steps it took for the VFX studio to achieve these shots from someone that worked there, but for the slow-shutter effect they programmed their own piece of software. I found something close for Blender but it utilizes multiple cameras and that isnât quite the effect, as it is influenced by the animation of the characters. Here are the steps:
Early version of what we would think of as photogrammetry / scans today for the people.
Bodies are mostly unlit textures with baked lighting.
Bodies have basic deformer rigs with a single animation arc between 3 or 4 poses.
A script runs at render time to change the rig animation (not camera) to make the renderer think it moves really far on an arc over the course of the blur shutter. Imagine over the shutter blur samples the whole body rig is animating from the normal frame 0 to frame 100, and you did 100 samples cross your blur, on each frame. So you see the full blurred animation, every frame.
Camera shutter blur is cranked way higher than normal.
End result is this cool blur effect where it looks like they are in bullet time every frame.
So itâs pretty straight forward except for Step 4. Is this possible to do in Blender using Python? Thank you again for your continued help and support.
I didnât watched the video on YT because didnât register for that⌠but:
Since there are âthousends of tutorialsâ for the slow shutter effect⌠i guess you could simple render it ânormalyâ to make some âfootageâ and then maybe using some of this techiquesâŚ
If the shutttering has to be âalongâ special areas you might use any object/material indeces or ID passes maybe mixed and/or filtered with some vector pass to get the ârightâ directions ??
Well itâs more than being a post effect, itâs an actual part of the 3D scene or it would look too 2D when the best way I could describe it is having its own volume in the 3D space.
So itâs more than a motion blur effect, I also thought it was motion blur, but as to get motion blur the subject has to be moving quickly every frame. This is a âfrozen-in-timeâ shot, so there isnât actual movement from the subject except at specific times. The way itâs explained that they did this is they wrote a script to render in this case 100 frames of an animation, and the script renders out those frames of movement and combines them all into one shot to get the long exposure effect. The reason youâd want a script to do this for you is because the alternative is to manually composite all these frames together for every frame.
Itâs a Geometry Nodes setup that âsmearsâ the geometry of the mesh in 3D space to give the illusion of 2D âstretchâ animation. It still relies on the object moving, but you could maybe make the tracking object an empty so that the mesh can stay in place and just the smears move.
Not quite, at least I donât think so given what Iâm seeing it does. This is a very advanced idea for Blender I believe, this might just be too much to be requesting on a whim, but I thought it would be worth asking as it would make incredibly unique shots, I suppose the right person could make a very successful add-on if it could be figured out.
