Hi, I’ve been modeling a drone … I did the model to scale. I plan on doing some animation sequences (probably 5 to 10 seconds each with it in flight.
I would like to accurately animate the speed so that the motion blur is realistic. It by no means has to be perfect, I’d like to just come close.
The drone…
- Basically they say the drone cruises at 80 MPH …
-For the most part, the camera will be still and the drone will fly past it. There may be some sequences where I just rotate the camera on the z axis to follow the drone…
-Just trying to figure out what distance the thing should travel in a 5 sec fly by sequence?
Also… the propeller
The propeller has been rigged to rotate around the x axis… any wild guesses on how I should set the revolutions over a 5 second sequence?
OK … thanks in advance… I knew I should have studied math more 
You might need to start with something of a known size. Let’s say it is flying past a building. If you know how large the building is then you can it work. For example if the building is 10 feet wide and occupies 10 blender units then the scale is 1 blender unit per foot. Now you know that a a mile is 5280 blender units. 80 mph is roughly 117 feet per second so the object must traverse 117 blender units per second at that scale. If your scale is different you’ll need to convert it and use the same logic. Considering that the propeller is just a blur visually all you have to do is make it fast enough to make a blur. When photographing aircraft with different exposure settings you get different effects so you might want to look at pictures of aircraft in flight. A real prop will usually spin around 2000-3000 rpm but that would be overkill.
Thanks a bunch Heavenstorm… just starting some test animations now, and as you mentioned camera settings are going to be really important in this project, because otherwise in tests with default camera and the drone flying at approx speed /per second you mentioned, its way too blurry.