There have been a number of attempts over the years to create a motion blur.

Some have used a alpha setting on the camera, but this tends to generate unwanted transparencies and so is not really an option, IMHO.

Another way is to render the view to an object just infront of the camera, which is slightly delayed, and semi transparent. With several of these you can create a pretty convincing blur effect.

What I would like to see, if a shader, that is either applied to an object to make it blur, or better still a shader applied to a model as above, that is just in front of the camera, that does the capture and re-skin method faster.

Yeah only problem with rendering to an object obviously is that having several views is going to put a hugely heavy load on hardware.

Exactly Lost, which is why I asked if this could be done via a shader instead. I set up 3 shields, each with a view rendered to it, and even in the most basic of levels the FPS dropped to unplayable rates. This seems to be somewhat of an enigma in the land of FX...

To create (cheap-looking) motion blur you no't need a shader,
just make the bg_color 0,0,0
and make the camera also transparent

that must be all

@Roel

if you actually read the comments in this post (which you didnt), the hack job of making the camera transparent creates all sorts of transparent anomalies. Terrain and models get bad sorting problems, and generally this is unnacceptable. You do get a trail however, but this is not motion blur, only a "z-sort fumble" effect.

@Matt Aufderheide

All of computer graphics is a gimmick, whether you beleive it or not. No matter how many complex calculations are running in a parrallax bump shader, the surface of it is portrayed onto a flat horizon of pixels (your moniter). And since CG nowadays tries to imitate the human eye (like HDR lighting), motion blur is visible to the naked eye. Just shake a pencil fast enough and youll see that it smears.

@Straight Heart: With pro edition you can render the screen to a bmap panel and make it transparent. Then you get a very good motion blur. And that is of course motion blur. Because it blurs only motions.

Actually straight_heart is right. It doesn't blur anything, d3d just doesn't clear the frame buffer. With a motion blur effect you could stop the game at any time and still have the blur effect, yours is going to discontinue blurring. You can't really control it anyway and it's heavily framerate dependend.

What would be the proper way to make a blur with render to texture?

Cheers