Motion blur/motion trail

I love movies, and cinematics, and the coolest effects in my opinion is bullet time and motion blur or motion trail. Bullet time can be archieved by setting animation speed to really low and rotating a camera around.
But motion trail, ive been thinking about it, how to make it in wc3, tat for each step in the motion it leaves a frozen shadow of tat motion. Well here it is, a combination of 2 systems i made to archieve this.
Is is also possible to make the 2nd kind of motion trail: a motion leave echo of its own motion, which means the shadows wont freeze but will begin moving later than the actual motion.

Here is a video i made to demostrate the motion trail, looking forward to put this into my cinematic :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Bx48G4JFI

attached an image to show it in more detail, since youtube quality is bad

Amazing, the trail looks really good. Is it just a bunch of copies of the hero but with transparency?

Thats a pretty kool spell also. Mind if I use the idea?

I assume you use n dummy units for n length trails. You then play their animations the same time you play the main 1, and move, show and set opacity in a loop.

Awesome effect. I wonder how much lag it would generate, as it would look cool in a few maps.

That effect is uber prwnage.

Just one question: The trail unit... develop the same animation? or it's just a standing unit which is modified its height?

Indeed. I think it just changes the unit position, I hope MaD shared the code with the community.

its as ammorth think, so it does share the same animation, tats why i put the screenshot there.
It doesnt lag like ti is. Especially if its optimized, u can have plenty of units doing tat at the same time :)
I will share the code when i have optimized it...


Edit: having problems with New Gen and 1.21b patch... how gay of blizzard, they like to bug things

Quick Question: Are you using a dummy unit (non-hero unit) for the fades? I would think it would improve performance if you were not doing it already.

each fade is a unit created from same type of the original unit and moved to the original unit and locusted. This cose doesnt lag periodically, since all units were created at the beginning of execute, so we wont notice that.
And ofc we wont see this lag with just around 15 units with this motion trail visually showing at the same time. But it will prolly be a bit visual lag when there are more.. So this is recommended only for hero based games or cinematic, and should not be used with a massive amount of units.

also atm without optimization there are 20 shadows when the unit do this thing. When optimized the not visible shadows will be removed and increase performance more. so i think we can have up to 20 units doing this at the same time without lag.

idk...
i made allready something like that (it was a spell) years ago.

btw anim is setted by name or index ?
and in truth it's easy to do such trails... but relative laggy.

*suicide*
delayed previous actions... create a struct with needed info to rebuild and do this actions with needed delay.

fancy eye candy effects are mostly meant for cinematics. ^^
Anim is set by index, i dont trust names

here is the map code, open source... It is not done so u can just call the trail function yet, but u can prolly understand how it is done. IT also includes my 2 systems. The Object System (MaDOS) and the Scene system (MaDScene).
No documentation tho.. :P

Btw the map name is called "motion blur" and not madscene as the filename

This is not completely the same thing, so my apologies if I should've started another topic for this...

But does anyone remember the effect that all the Protoss High Templar's had in Starcraft? The one where, when ordered to move somewhere, they'd float really slow, but trail these blue "shadow versions" of themselves where they went? Well I found a way to mimic that; although I'd like to know if anyone has a better way.

(For those interested, what I found was that the normal unit ability called "Factory" in the Object Editor can be modified to work super-fast, with a blue-tinted dummy "shadow unit" with no pathing. This causes shadows to appear constantly behind the unit, trailing when it moves. Unfortunately, it works even when they are standing still, so it's not perfect by any means.)

Use JASS and make a function to detect when moving, then check every X(~0.1) second whether it is moving or not. If it is moving then make a shadow, otherwise don't make a shadow.