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 (the same switch as Motion Blur in Project Settings), 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.
A layer's switch also covers every layer inside it. Switch it on for a group, a mesh or a character's top layer, and every layer it holds blurs too, so a character made of many layers is switched on in one place. The dots of the layers inside show faint, so you can see where their blur comes from.
Blur works wherever the layer sits: at the top of the list, inside a group or under a mask, and on a 3D layer, whose tilted picture is blurred along its real motion. Inside a symbol it follows the symbol's own playback: a held symbol stays sharp, and one playing in reverse blurs the other way. The layer's own effects and a gradient fill blur with it and keep their colours.
A layer travelling along a path blurs along the curve rather than in a straight line, and when it has Elasticity the blur bends with the layer.
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 to 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
Playback, scrubbing and export all use the Samples count from Project Settings, so a frame looks the same whether the timeline is running or parked on it. If playback feels heavy, lower Samples. A layer that moves only a short way in a frame can be drawn with fewer samples than the setting, because more would look exactly the same.
Blurred frames are kept in the frame cache like any other frame, so a looping playback pays for the blur only on its first pass. While you drag a vertex, a bone, a layer or a motion path, a layer blurred by its own morphing points, by a bone rig or by Follow Path is drawn sharp and blurs again when you let go, so editing never stalls on every mouse movement.
The canvas also reuses what it has already drawn. Layer effects are kept between frames while their layer does not change and are worked out once per frame under motion blur, and motion blur is drawn from one picture of the layer moved along its path wherever that matches the motion. Exports still compute every frame in full.
The same goes for zooming, panning or rotating the view: that blur is shown sharp while the view moves, and comes back as soon as the view settles.