Light Trails in Maya

[Norb]

if glows support motion blur you could make objects with glows, and render them on a seperate pass with a shitload of blur or something.....

[Grayscale]

Thanks. I'll give it a try.

[beaker]

Much faster to do it in post. Dont have to spend hours rerendering.

Sorry if this sounds like greek, I'm just pulling this out of my head so Im not even sure it will work exactly as I am describing it. This may not work if the camera changes alot.

Render the character in its own layer, then make 2-3 copies of the same character layer in the comp. Layer them under the master character layer. Offset each one by a few frames in the timeline(depending on how fast the character moves). Take the alpha of the copies and subtract the alpha of the master layer from the copies. This will make it so only the difference between the current frame of animation and the offset of the animation is showing. Kind of a rim to the character. Then add motion blur and glows to the copies.

I'm thinking about this from a shake perspective but I don't think it would be that big of a deal doing the same thing in afterfx or any other compositor.

[GreytheSkunk]

If you wanted to do this effect in post, After Effects has a built in effect called "Echo." You just put the effect on a layer and you have several options to control how many frames are blended together, how the values fade and are interpolated, and how the final effect is transfered to the frame.

I've used this on a few projects and I find it so useful. It makes it really easy to do long streaks and blurs like the motorcycle chase in the beginning of Akira....or the stuff from Splinter Cell.

Hope that helps...

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