OpenGL Programming Guide

Chapter 10The Framebuffer

The Accumulation Buffer

Motion Blur

Similar methods can be used to simulate motion blur, as shown in Figure J-7 and Figure 10-2 . Suppose your scene has some stationary and some moving objects in it, and you want to make a motion-blurred image extending over a small interval of time. Set up the accumulation buffer in the same way, but instead of spatially jittering the images, jitter them temporally. The entire scene can be made successively dimmer by calling

glAccum (GL_MULT, decayFactor);

as the scene is drawn into the accumulation buffer, where decayFactor is a number between 0.0 and 1.0. Smaller numbers for decayFactor cause the object to appear to be moving faster. You can transfer the completed scene with the object's current position and "vapor trail" of previous positions from the accumulation buffer to the standard color buffer with

glAccum (GL_RETURN, 1.0);

The image looks correct even if the items move at different speeds, or if some of them are accelerated. As before, the more jitter points you use, the better the final image, at least up to the point where you begin to lose resolution due to finite precision in the accumulation buffer. You can combine motion blur with antialiasing by jittering in both the spatial and temporal domains, but you pay for higher quality with longer rendering times.

Figure 10-2 : A Motion-Blurred Object

OpenGL Programming Guide