Flash Motion Blur

Update – just posted the source to my MotionBlurSprite class.

Years ago when the Flash Player 8 beta was released and we got our first glimpses of Photoshop style filters such as Drop Shadow, Glow & Blur, I was pretty disappointed to note that there was no ability to specify an angle for the BlurFilter, which would enable motion blur in any direction. As it was, it looked like we were limited to horizontal and vertical blurs only due to the fact that Flash filters are always applied after transforms, no matter what order you have them in your code. After reading a somewhat cryptic FlashCoders post from an Adobe employee that hinted that directional blur could be achieved, I discovered that it was possible using the new bitmap methods.

Let’s say you want to apply a 45 degree blur to a Sprite. Off-stage, rotate the Sprite -45 degrees, then draw it to a BitmapData instance. Then, apply a horizontal BlurFilter to the BitmapData, throw it on the stage and rotate it 45 degrees back to zero.

Anyway, this is all old news now – the reason for this post is because I’ve got an idea for how to achieve quick-and-dirty radial and zoom blurs in Flash. So I’ve upgraded the motion blur effect to AS3. I’ll post the motion blur class once I’ve cleaned it up – at the moment it’s just a proof-of-concept. Here’s the basic motion blur effect:

Radial & zoom blur coming soon…

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