How to Create Radial Motion Blur in KeyShot

If you want to create sense of motion, it’s pretty common to use linear motion through a translation animation to make that happen. Radial motion blurs using rotation animations can be added to wheels to provide the same sense of motion. But how do you give the sense that the  entire environment is rotating?

Radial Blur in KeyShot

Nils Piirma, Automotive CGI Artist, creates incredible auto shots using KeyShot and recently published a quick tutorial showing his approach to creating a radial blur inside KeyShot. If you’ve seen his work on the KeyShot forum, it’s very similar to how he adds motion blur to wheels. Watch below and jump to the 4:50 mark to see how he sets it up.

Simple, huh?  There are three things working together here. 1) He’s using a physical environment (not a backplate or an HDRI). 2) He’s applying the rotation animation to only the physical environment. 3) He’s setting the time indicator line at the end of the rotation animation in the Animation timeline.

Rotating On Center

But what if you want to rotate the physical environment from a center point? Well, Nils has another video showing how to approach this.

As he did in the other video, he’s rotating the entire physical scene, but to set it on a center rotation, he uses a sphere to mark his centerline axis, selecting the entire model to rotate on the axis.

Both are easy to do in KeyShot and, as you can see, the results are striking. Nils posts the occasional KeyShot tutorial to his YouTube channel and you can follow him on Facebook or Instagram to see what he’s creating in KeyShot.