Using T2D's particle engine for motion blur?

#1 True motion blur, as in "render to texture" is not currently supported. If you want this effect, you will have to build it yourself or wait until someone implements it.

That said, I am not sure that motion blur is what you had in mind. I believe that you could achieve the effect you desire by mounting one or more sprites to your character's main sprite. One of the mount variables allows for delayed movement. If this variable were set, your main charactor would move and the mounted "shadows" would follow that character's movement at different delayed intervals. This effect would be very much like the ghosting shadows seen in the Castlevania series.

"Motion lines" are typically just primitives (1 or more quads attached to each other) with the far side of the quad set to various levels of transparency. You could presumably achieve this effect with my primitive addon for T2D.

What is admittedly more difficult, is making a motion line across only one single portion of the sprite (I.E. only following the hands). This would presumably be achieved by attaching a quad to a mount point. Unfortunately, I do not believe that mount points currently can be set at discrete locations for every sprite frame. This does not mean that the problem has no solution, but you may have to be creative or do some custom work to achieve motion lines mounted to an appendage in the present.

#2 Imagine what you could do with T2d compiled into TSE.... millions of various shader including some uber blur.

#3 Sorry to dig up and old thread but has things moved on at all?

Is it possible to do motion blur effects in TGB. Am i correct in thinking that in TorqueX some shader functionality will be built in as well making it possible to apply shader effects in 2d Games?

Cheers Guys

Warren

#4

Quote:Basically I want my player sprite to be constantly emmitted from one location (mounted on the player object in the game) and then trail the player as he moves. Anyone have any suggestions?

I think that sounds like a great idea. I did a very similar thing for creating evil glowing red enemies in a recent game I did:

I think what Christopher suggested is a great idea. Create a particle effect with a single emitter of type "point", have it emit the player's sprite from a fixed location at the same size as the player, give it a speed of 0, and have it fade out over the player's lifetime. A couple minutes of experimentation on my part produced this:

Next step of course is to have the particle emitter use the correct player image for each onUpdateScene.

Did that help, Warren?

--clint

Edit: Bah, sorry -- I just re-read more of the post and realized you were asking about true shader effects in TGB, not the issue of faking it with particle emitters. Sorry!

#5 Clint, that's excellent!

I'd suggest leaving it as it is, applying something like a 50% scene slowdown, and presto you have a slo-mo, Matrix style ninja swinging his sword!

You might need to layer the effect on top of the sprite rather than behind, but I'm sure a little more tinkering would produce the desired result :)

#6 Because I wasn't updating the particle emitter's image depending on what the current player's image was, it didn't look quite right when I had the particle effect layered in front. And you're right -- it does look very Matrix-ey. :) I think that's a fantastic idea about the slowdown though -- that hadn't occurred to me!

#7 Awesome effect! Hadn't thought of using particles in that way!

#8 Then you hadn't played old school Ninja Gaiden enough ;D.

I just threw that effect on some stuff I'm working on, coz' it's so easy to do. You can also get a a very nice glow or soft edge effect by using this same technique to create localized particles with a small amount of random movement on them.

#9 Hey, this is great. I'd been thinking about doing something very similar to this. Glad to see it can be done. :)