To see this effect, click the video below.

Start by working with either a finished composite or footage to which you want to add motion blur and/or depth of field. In this example, CGI source assets were rendered out of mental ray by my good pal, Daryl Obert, a technical marketing specialist at Autodesk. In addition, he was gracious enough to include a separate grayscale ZDepth pass and a velocity render pass within Toxik.

From the Tools & Views gate, select Blur from the Filtering set of tools and drop this onto your primary asset. Notice that Toxik’s Blur tool now includes several tabs for different types of blur, including standard blurring with option mask input, Modulation blur and Vector blur. It’s the last two types we’re interested in here, because we want to selectively blur the image- based on distance from the camera- as fast as things are moving within each frame.

From the floating Library Browser ( Cntrl+ O), select the velocity and the ZDepth render passes and link them into the current composition by dropping them into any schematic view. If you don’t have a velocity pass for your footage, you can apply Toxik’s “Motio” tool to the source imagery instead. This tool can extract up to per-pixel velocity for both forward and backward motion vectors on any type of media supported within Toxik.

Drag a wire from the output of the ZDepth footage and bring it into the Modulation input of the Blur node. This will provide luminance information to the blur tool so that it can calculate depth of field effects.

Drag a wire from the output of the Velocity pass into the Blur node’s Forward Vectors input tab. If you don’t have a Velocity render pass and are using Toxik’s Motio tool instead, you can take its forward vector output and wire this into the Blur tool. Either way, you will now be providing the metadata for the Blur tool to calculate motion blur.

At this point, the motion blur and depth-of-field effects are both set to a value of zero. In this technique, the order in which you apply these effects doesn’t matter because this single Blur tool within Toxik will apply the results of both effects as a single, resulting blur. For this example, let’s do Modulation (depth of field) blur first. With the Blur node selected, switch to the modulation tab of the tool and increase the X and Y radius values until the depth-of-field effect is desirable. In the example provided, I’ve cranked the blur amount way up to make the depth-of-field effect more obvious on the printed page.

With the Blur node still selected, switch to the Vectors tab of the controls at the bottom of the UI. Enable View Vectors and adjust the Interval and Display Scale settings. The result in the viewport is simply to help see where some pixels are moving faster than others (and it’s also just really dang cool to see!). If you’re using Toxik’s Motio tool, the motion vectors will show automatically.

When satisfied, turn off View Vectors and adjust the Length and Width settings to set the desired amount of motion blur. Note that both the depth of field and motion blur amounts can optionally be animated within Toxik.

From this point on, you can adjust both motion blur and depth of field to your liking. When you’re satisfied with the result, click either IR button to cache the intermediate results to the local mediacache. This will store the result as a local asset so that downstream tools added later can work on cached frames instead of having to calculate the motion blur and depth of field. You can always make changes to them and it will get re-cached the next time you hit play.

Autodesk Toxik currently does not require any specific hardware, apart from an NVIDIA Quadro FX series graphics adapter. Toxik supports a local "mediacache" per workstation, so feeding it a fast RAID array will scale the uncompressed real-time playback accordingly. Give artists Wacom tablets and 24-inch monitors and you’ll have a very productive studio!

Gary M. Davis
3D Animation & Compositing Specialist, Autodesk
Owner, visualZ, LLC

Gary M. Davis received a BFA in Computer Graphics in 1992. Since that time, he has worked in visual effects and motion graphics for television, film, video games and design visualization projects. From 2004′ 07, Davis served as the only independent, worldwide certified training specialist for 3ds Max, Combustion and Toxik. During this time he also authored The Focal Easy Guide to Combustion. At the SIGGRAPH 2007 Conference, Davis was awarded the title of Autodesk 3ds Max Master. Shortly after the show, he joined Autodesk’s Media and Entertainment Division as specialist for 3D animation and compositing software solutions. He maintains visualZ as a private consulting and training boutique in Orlando, Florida. Reach him via www.visualZ.com.

Gary Says Keep In Mind…
Any type of moving media can take advantage of these effects- not just CGI. Autodesk Toxik has a tool called “Motio” that can pre-calculate and optionally cache the motion estimation of pixel velocity on any type of footage, including that shot from real-world analog and digital motion picture cameras. This information can then be used to generate motion blur that can be dialed in and fine-tuned in real time. Performing depth of field requires a grayscale depth map. These can be automatically calculated within a 3D rendering engine, such as Mental Ray, or they can be added to real-world footage using Toxik’s mask, tracking and paint toolset. Adding post-processed motion blur or depth of field to CGI in Toxik means that the 3D render times will be significantly shorter and also allow these effects to be dialed in as a post process in real time.

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