PC Games start using motion blur

[ram]

In MotoGP, an Xbox and PC arcade racer, you can active motion blur as special effect. It's very cool, it gives you a nice speed feeling. I knew this effect from a NCG game called Extreme-G3 racing. Dunno how they do it on the NGC, but MotoGP seem to use DX8 multisample buffer for the effect. AFAIK this is the first game making use of this feature:

 

[CosmoKramer]

Also in Jedi Knight II

 

[jb]

UT2003 also supports it.

 

[Brent]

GTA3 for the PC uses some kind of Blur, don't know specifically if it's real motion blur or not but it's an option in the game...

 

[Colourless]

MotoGP's motion blur is not 'real' motion blur. I also doubt it's using multisample buffers since AFAIK the only card to support multisample buffer masking is the Voodoo 5

 

[mat]

IIRC had Soul Reaver 2 (PC version came out last year) also sometimes some kind of Motion bur.

 

[Hyp-X]

MotoGP's motion blur is not 'real' motion blur. I also doubt it's using multisample buffers since AFAIK the only card to support multisample buffer masking is the Voodoo 5

Yes it's not motion blur.
It's motion trail.
A quite different concept.

And you don't need multisample buffers, only rendering to texture capability.

 

[ram]

Yes it's not motion blur. It's motion trail. A quite different concept.

Hmm, can you explain that?


BTW, Jedi Knight only seem to use the effect for the light sword, not the whole scene like MotoGP.

 

[Thowllly]

Yes it's not motion blur. It's motion trail. A quite different concept.

Hmm, can you explain that?

Motion blur: Shows movement within a frame. Usually done by blending together a number of frames. Like drawing 240 frames per second, but blending together 4 and 4, showing 60 motion blurred frames per second on the screen. The amount of blurring and the direction of the blurring shows in witch direction the objects are moving. Gives a feeling of smoother movement.

Motion trail: Blending current frame together with the previous frame. You show the same number of frames per second as you draw per second. Used for special fx, and nothing else. It's what's used so frequently on the PS2.

 

[Colourless]

And you don't need multisample buffers, only rendering to texture capability.

Yeah, I know, I was just reply to someone else who stated they thought it might have been using Multisample buffers.

 

[ram]

Motion blur: Shows movement within a frame. Usually done by blending together a number of frames. Like drawing 240 frames per second, but blending together 4 and 4, showing 60 motion blurred frames per second on the screen. The amount of blurring and the direction of the blurring shows in witch direction the objects are moving. Gives a feeling of smoother movement.

Motion trail: Blending current frame together with the previous frame. You show the same number of frames per second as you draw per second. Used for special fx, and nothing else. It's what's used so frequently on the PS2.

Interesting, MT seems simple but effective. The visual result shouldn't look that much different from motion blur done by bleding together several frames. Or what are the drawbacks of MT?

UT2003 also supports it.

Do you have any details on that? Which technique do they use?

 

[Basic]

There is indeed a big difference.

Motion blur make it look like you're getting a higher fps than you do.

Motion trails make it look like you're on drugs.

 

[king_iron_fist]

i could've sworn that MGS2 occasionly uses 'real' motion blur as well as depth of field.

I also doubt that UT2003 will effectively use motion blur although it would be v nice if it did .

 

[Riptides]

Motion trails make it look like you're on drugs.

Or, it leads to a great, yet freaky, effect in this racing game (motoGP).

Made me crash my bike the first time i saw the scenery blur at over 250 kph.

 

[Vince]

Can't a form of Motion Blur be accomplished threw the use of vertex programs? I could have sworn nVidia had a demonstration using Vertex Shaders. Anyone remmeber this?

 

[king_iron_fist]

yeah they did - I don't think its ever been used though

 

[Saem]

MotoGP's motion blur is not 'real' motion blur. I also doubt it's using multisample buffers since AFAIK the only card to support multisample buffer masking is the Voodoo 5

The orignal Radeon had this feature, if I'm not mistaken.

Just one question to the folks in the know.

Would it be possible to do temporal anti-aliasing (motion blur) by taking the rendering one frame, then blending that frame with the previous frame buffer (which you keep stored) except alpha blend it and/or shift the colour values of the previous frame so they're lighter and then store that new frame, keep on doing that over and over?

The way it plays out in my head is that you keep a decaying average of what you saw and blended in with what you see now, meaning that frames would be blurred together. Of course, this would be a bit like truform. Where the level of blending would be constant and thus not representitive of the amount of movement (view port change) there is. With that said, one could provide the facilities to have developers be able to on the fly (per frame basis) change the blend/average constant to increase or decrease effect of the previous frame buffer on the current one. Based on how much the view port changes there are. It might require some developer tweaking but it should be pretty easy.

The reason I ask is, wouldn't this be a much better way that to simply render 4 frames and blend them and then put them out there? It would be faster since, each frame would only need 1 extra texture pass. Now that I think about it, the original Radeon would have done this really well. 1 light + 1 texture and 1 blur.

 

[king_iron_fist]

Seems feasible but I think the nvidia vertex shader approach was kinda similar.

One of the problems with this approach is that you'd have to lock the frame rate at say 60fps to get it to work (although you could easily get away with 30fps if the implementation was good.

 

[nggalai]

Hi there,

There is indeed a big difference.
Motion trails make it look like you're on drugs.

LOL

My thoughts exactly when I played GTA3 for the first time. "What the hell was in that piece of cake???"

I am not too fond of the motion trail technique as used in GTA3 and other PS2 titles. It looks too artificial, IMO. But then, a "denser" trail might produce more realistic results.

ta,
.rb

P.S. UT2003 uses motion blur or motion trails? yes, jb, I'd be interested in more detailed information, too, if you could provide some.rb

 

[Saem]

One of the problems with this approach is that you'd have to lock the frame rate at say 60fps to get it to work (although you could easily get away with 30fps if the implementation was good.

You lost me in the pronouns. My approach or nVidia's approach?

Perhaps having an internal counter to count how far apart each complete frame render inside the video card and then blending accordingly might do the trick, if low fps and blurring artifacts are a concern.