I’m a traditional stop motion animator (puppet guy) who knows NOTHING about computer animation… so why am I here? Because I’m wondering if there is any possible way to apply the Vector/Motion blur in Blender to traditional photographic animation?
I already know that there are plug-ins I can use for After Effects, Premier and other movie editing software packages but, I simply cannot afford any of those at this time. I’m betting that the answer to my question is NO but, sometimes when I ask a silly question the answer will surprise me.
To be crystal clear about my question… If I were to load an old Bugs Bunny cartoon or Wallace & Gromit clay animation film clip into Blender, is there any chance I would be able to apply motion blurs to that animation?
Neither motion blur and stop motion are my fields, but if you don’t plan to do /any/ CG work, you will probably find Blender frustrating to work with. StopMojo ( http://www.mondobeyondo.com/projects/stopmojo/ ) might be what you are looking for. I never tried it myself, so I have no idea what it can do.
That said, adding motion blur to Wallace & Gromit should, as far as I can tell, not be possible at the first frames of a sequence as there are no frames before the first frame to base the motion blur on.
No, because Blender can not “see” whats inside the plane. Blender can not detect the motion that is happening in a video sequence. Even if you set the plane in motion, all blender could do is render vector blur on a plane in motion.
After Effects has a tool just for this, it is called “Force Motion Blur”. That tool actually detects the pixel movement of footage and tries to guess the blur.
You might be able to fake it with carefully placed directional Blurs. Especially if the blur needs to happen in a predictable way, like left to right or up/down.
That’s what I expected, Thanks. I’m well aware of the motion blur capability in After Effects, one of my partners has a motion blur plug-in for Premier and it works beautifully. But I hate to bug him to add the motion blur to my animation every time I need it… guess I’m just going to have to shell out the buck for After Effects. Thanks again!
This may be also out of your “price range,” but ILM did a lot of good work with motion-controlled puppetry (called go-motion instead of stop-motion) where the puppets were animated using computer-driven motors that actually activated during a frame exposure, causing very convincing motion blur. The flick I remember clearest using this was Dragonslayer. This was just before the digital revolution that supplanted so much of solid-figure animation. Biggest problem was image composition, though, since optical bluescreen wasn’t all that clean a process, but with digital techniques (Blender can do many of these) it should be much better and more efficient.
Dragonslayer has been an inspiration of mine for many years! But, ‘go motion’ had sever limitations for both the movement of the puppet and freedom of the puppet to be free from a mechanical base. Fortunately ‘go motion’ has gone extinct and the software that exists for adding motion blur does it perfectly and leaves total freedom for the animator to do anything possible (and impossible) with the puppet.
Here’s a link to a test animation I shot recently and a friend of mine applied the motion blur to it using Premier (at least I think it was Premier) and it looks fantastic. Bear in mind when you see this that it is JUST A TEST and there are flaws that would be improved on a ‘real shot’. Here’s the link…
Cool stuff! I’m glad there are some Harryhausen fans still around (I grew up with his work – Saturday matinees, 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts… didn’t get any better for a dream-brained tadpole :D)
I wasn’t aware that go-motion had such limitations, but I can see how it might given the required mechanical linkages. Looked great in the day, though.
I just got a job doing a stop motion scene on the upcoming film ‘Sinbad The 5th Voyage’! It’s a real honor for me to be shooting that because Ray Harryhausen (or 'Uncle Ray as we stop motion people refer to him) was a huge influence on my career. I’ve been working for quite a while on animations that will hopefully bring that style of puppet animation back into the main stream.
That test shot was mean just to ‘kick the tires’ on some of the newer methods of blending the animation with the live action footage… more to come!
