We’ve always been told that UE4 couldn’t do radial motion blur (which is why the wheels look so rubbish in the game with MB enabled) and there was absolutely nothing that could be done about it. This document would suggest otherwise... https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/Materials/HowTo/RadialMotionBlur/index.html Genuinely interested to know what’s missing here. If it can be done, why is it not being? These little things all add up to big differences.
Unless I'm mistaken (did a quick skim read) I think what it's doing is basically putting a blurry texture on the wheel ("Radial Motion Blur Material"), which they've said multiple times they'll not do, mainly because (they say) it'd look horrible/unsatisfactory on something like a Class 08 - or a steam train.
Surely then, you don’t apply the texture to the Class 08 or Steam train, but you do apply it to everything else. I’m a complete layman admittedly so am obviously missing something...
They should deactivate Motion Blur just for the wheels and keep the rest untouched. Is this even possible?
Possibly it's not a progressive blur ? All or nothing ... So why it may not look as good on a slower class of train, in my experience yes the whole motion blur thing is important for immersion, but the wheel thing ... that's just never worked in TSW !
They could, but again that'd look bad on an 08 or steamer or similar. I'm not sure if they can mask off the motion blur on the wheels of individual locos.
If I’m reading it correctly it’s simply a blurred texture you add to the object you want to rotate. So they could add it to the wheels they wanted to blur, and not add it to the ones they didn’t.
The thing is, motion blur together with whole host of other UE parameters/features (e.g. DefaultFeature.LensFlare, CameraMotionSway, SceneColorFringe.Max, SceneColorFringeQuality, EyeAdaptationQuality) have nothing to do with recreating reality, but rather recreating a motion picture of reality: importing into the virtual world the artifacts of the camera, on the premise that most people view most of the world on a screen rather than in reality and so that's what they're used to. I prefer real reality in a sim.
That's what it seems after reading the document. I don't own a class 08 and won't buy steam so surely they can add that to the trains that they want to add it for and for the other trains that will "look bad" they shouldn't do so
Umm, you do know that motion blur is also a thing for the naked eye in reality as well, right? Most modern cameras can recard pictures without any motion blur, but that looks unnatural, which is why modern movies still do it, and why they're included in games as well. Because it's like reality.
Im more concerned of how the motion blur is going to look on Steam Locos, DTG better have something in the bag that'll sort that dreaded UE4 Motion Blur render.
The workaround mentioned is "apply blurry picture to simulate motion blur" Your addition to that is "only apply to trains which can go really fast" but think of the nuances here You have a train which you're bringing into service out of a depot (cold start) You start to move out of the depot at 5MPH - do you apply wheel motion blur at his point? The train's moving after all You then get onto the depot sidings / reception track, the speed increases to 15mph - do you apply wheel motion blur at his point? We're still in 08 territory You move out onto the secondary lines, you're running at 40mph - do you need the wheels blurred, maybe, but REALLY blurred? You're on a mainline at 100mph, definitely need wheel blur So maybe, for this workaround DTG would need to create the wheel static, then very slow, slow, moderate, fast and very fast wheel blur overlays. That's 6 wheel assets at each stage. THEN you need something to monitor the speed of the consist and apply the overlays, check whether you're viewing the assets in the first place, etc etc All of this adds to the processor cost and thus slows the game down. And let's not forget the most basic train in the game (the 08) has six wheels... the most complex? Lets say it's double headed CO-CO locomotives hauling 9 carriages. That's 12 wheels on each engine, 8 on each carriage so 24 + 72 = 96 wheels to monitor or change at any given moment. I would say the impact on useage (the cost) would be too high for what is very little impact on actual gameplay
Well, surely you could just have motion blur automatically off until a certain speed (as the wheels rotate anyway) and then come on as you pass the set speed, say 15mph. Assuming it can’t be done gradually it surely has to look better than it does at the minute.
To be fair, I’ve read a bit more on it and it looks like UE4.25 and upwards has new features in this area. This, I would guess, is why DTG have said they need to upgrade to 4.26 for Steam engines. It would make sense. Back in my box
Nope, it would have to be queried at each moment to see if the threshold has been reached, I would imagine the new update to UE4.x will give a better and more even approach, but we shall wait and see
This is a technique that DTG is aware of but has decided is not suitable for their game from a design perspective (I distinctly remember a snide remark from Sam on a livestream in response to someone linking this article, saying something along the lines of, "I'm sure the development team has never ever thought of this or read this UE4 documentation before"). For most trains, I think it would be fine, although keep in mind this would be an asset-by-asset basis which means it would take manual patching of all previous DLC to work. But the greatest hurdle is uniform application. I think it was Matt that said that this style of motion blur would not work for locomotives with coupling rods--which are the locomotives that happen to suffer from the motion blur artefacting the most. The best bet would be a separate post-processing motion blur effect that tackles radial blur specifically, or an updated motion blur effect that can recognise both needs. That way, no work would need to be done retroactively to previous assets and would be more flexible for future core updates. If what you say is true, I certainly hope for some updates to the motion blur post effects with the steam update. Cheers
