How to create motion blurs

How to create motion blurs - aka the "swooshes" that trail after a fast-moving weapon

Here, weapons can be divided into two different categories, those being slashing weapons (maces included), and thrusting weapons, like spears.

There are two things you need to do - first, you need to visualize correctly the way that the weapon will move through the air. This needs to get "collapsed" into a two-dimensional drawing of it's path. Nothing will goof up a motion blur more than having an incorrect path, and unfortunately, I can't really help with this, my best advice is really to just watch either a friend swinging a mock weapon (or oneself in a mirror), or a movie wherein the characters look competent in the use of their weaponry.

The second thing is how you draw that path, and this I can teach. In earlier versions of wesnoth, and in a number of our existing unit animations, the motion blur would be a shape filled with a solid color, set to high transparency.

There's a better way to do this, which is to use the smudge tool in either photoshop or the gimp. Create a new layer to put the motion blur in, and set the smudge tool to sample it's values from all layers. Set it to a very small pixel width (about 1 pixel), and carefully touch down with it in the brightest color of the weapon. Drag this out in an arc, following the movement path of the weapon. These trails should be longer at points where the weapon is moving faster, and should be thicker where the weapon is thickest - the thin tips of most swords do not have the most opaque blur.

I'll add images to this tutorial as soon as I create another motion blur for a weapon.

See Also

Basic Animation Tutorial Art Tutorials Create Art