The MotionBlur Flash extension takes a (new) motion tween, analyzes the movement, and creates a motion blur. Because the new motion model allows each property on a tween to be set independently, this extension is able to generate independent blurring for horizontal (x) and vertical (y) movement. It can take into account some rotation as well as some movement on the z-plane (3D), but its primarily designed to track x and y motion.

It works best if you run the extension after you’ve completed all easing and other adjustments on the tween first. If have to you adjust your path or motion easing, you can simply run the MotionBlur command again to re-calibrate.

The motion curves for blur x and blur y are optimized as well, so they add as few new keyframes to your tween as possible. The amount of blur is also adjusted based on the document’s frame rate (higher frame rate = faster animation = more blur).

Download
(Compatibility: CS4 & newer)
MotionBlur.mxp

If you’ve opened Extension Manager CS4, you might have noticed there’s a longer list of products available than there have been in previous versions.

You can now package Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, InCopy, and Bridge scripts and SWF panels (yes, most of these apps can have SWF panels now!) as Extension Manager packages. Flash, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver have worked with Extension Manager for years (since they all used to be Macromedia products). Extension Manager comes free with any Adobe CS4 application, so CS4 users will already have it installed. So far, I haven’t noticed Adobe making a big deal about this, but this is a great new capability for Adobe users and developers.

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