Motion Blur shutter Angle
In more and more places in Blender we have realword units now. Lately we got color temperature for Lights in Kelvin.
But the Motion Blurs shutter is still a 0 - 1 slider. Shutter is measured in shutter angle for motion picture and that way its easily understadable how it works, a 0 - 1 range is very confusing to use.
Even now the Tooltip says incorrectly: "Time taken between Frames". But time / fractions of a scond wouldn't make sense in the Blender context. Shutter Angle is the standart in motion pictures. It would only be consequent since we use F Stop, focal lenght, sensor size etc.
I dont know how this would work best with Blenders global units, setting the shutterangle to Radians wouldn't make sense so it should be hardcoded to Angle in Degrees. I'm currently not sure how to execute that best.
4 Comments
I have to disagree with you, especially regarding
As is blender's current system is simply the percentage of the frame that the shutter is open, and personally I (and probably most other people) expect an angle to mean rotation, not (percentage of frame exposed) * 360. It is also very easy to convert in a calculator, or the input inside blender by simply dividing the shutter angle by 360 to get your target value, or multiplying your shutter value by 360 to get shutter angle.
Well, you can calculate it by hand, but that was never the point, you can also just imagine the Meter behind Loaction values. But bender now uses Meters by default so everyone has a sense of scale.
Having Degerees Kelvin for the color of a light might also sound wired, but it is the industry standart and has a technical background why its used.
You could also use FOV degrees, but everyone who ever used a camera knows focal length + sensor size. 0 -1 shutter is just not based anywhere in the real world, on first glance "0.5" might mean 1/2 of a second as the only other measure of shutter is fractions of a second.
Still, Measuring shutter speed as an angle is a reference to an old system of motion cameras that your average user will not know about nor understand.
Using meters for location seems logical because meters are a unit of distance/location; using degrees kelvin for color temperature is logical because kelvin is a unit of temperature; but using degrees as a measure of time seems illogical because in our everyday experience, degrees are a measure of rotation, not time.
One way to disambiguate the current system would be to show the unit that it uses internally, so it would be 0.5 frames instead of a dimensionless quantity of 0.5.
FYI Physical Motion Blur was just added to the extensions platform, and it adds shutter angle as an option for motion blur :)