Motion blur

Hello everyone!

Our brand new racing game is nearing completion! In fact it is going through a QA test session right now. Everyone here at XForm is playing the game and looking for bugs, glitches and other strange issues to be fixed. It's up to Stijn, Diederik and me to fix these issues and make sure the game runs smooth and is fun to play!
Most of the time I've been working on tweaking the gameplay and fixing little issues. I also worked on some special effects to enhance the graphics of the game. One of them is motion blur.
Motion blur gives the user the feeling of speed. It makes slow movement appear to have much more displacement than it actually has. We first used the built in motion blur effect of Unity, which gave us this effect:

Previous motion blur

It works by blending previously rendered frames on top of eachother with a specific percentage to create the effect. This works fairly well as long as the framerate is decent enough. When the framerate becomes to low, the whole screen gets filled up with blurryness instead of the slight blurryness between frames we're looking for.

So we needed a better looking motion blur effect. I got inspired by the so called 'Radial Blur' effect in photoshop. It is a fixed effect that does not really interact with the 3D world and movement. But it does look better than the standard Unity motion blur. It also gives the same effect whatever the framerate of the game is, which is good.

This is the motion blur we currently have:

Current motion blur

That's it for now! I'm going to continue with, as we say over here in Holland, 'Putting the dots on the i' ;)

Greetings,

Joep