Motion blur
Two switches smear a moving layer across the frames it travels, with Shutter Angle, Phase and Samples controlling how the trail looks and what it costs to render.
Motion blur smears a moving layer across the frames it travels, so a fast pan or a quick gesture reads as continuous motion instead of a strobe of sharp poses.
Two switches gate it: the scene-wide Motion Blur toggle on the Timeline toolbar, and a per-layer Motion Blur dot in its own timeline column. Turn on the scene switch, then flip on only the layers that actually need to blur, and everything else stays crisp.
Shutter angle, phase and samples
These live in Project Settings, alongside the frame rate and canvas size: they apply to the whole project, not one layer.
| Setting | Default | Range | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shutter Angle | 180° | 0 to 720° | How much of the frame's motion window gets smeared in; 180° is the classic film default, 360° covers a full frame's worth of motion |
| Shutter Phase | 0° | -360...360° | Slides that window earlier or later relative to the frame |
| Samples | 16 | 2 to 64 | How many sub-frame positions are blended into the trail: more samples means a smoother trail, slower to render |
Trailing shutter
The blur samples run backward from the current frame (at Shutter Phase 0 the window covers everything from the shutter opening up to this instant, never past it) so the trail lags behind the direction of travel instead of surrounding the pose evenly.
Velocity is measured frame to frame, so anything at rest between two identical keyframes blurs at exactly zero. The first and last frame of a move stay sharp, because there is no motion there yet to smear.
What it costs
Samples clamp to 2 to 6 during live playback and scrubbing, whatever the project is set to render at, so the viewport stays responsive. Export uses the full sample count from Project Settings, up to 64.
Motion-blurred frames are never pulled from or written into the frame cache (a cached frame would freeze one sample of a moving blur) so scrubbing through a blurred sequence re-renders every frame it touches.