Heatwaves

[Toonwonder]

Can anyone point towards a tutorial or tell me how to create heatwaves? I have a scene where I am inside liquid and I need an effect such as "ripple glass" found in 2D animation.

[Mylenium]

If you mean the "smear" created by thermal turbulences this would still be done most easily in a compositing app. One would only create b/w images using particles to define the flow of these turbulent streams. They would then be brought into the 2D environment and then combined with displacement filters, blurs etc. to distort the RGB image. You would have to render in passes, though. BTW, you can also achieve this effect in LWby mapping your rendered output to a flat poly and using a combination of "normal" texturing mode plus a layer as displacement. Via image editor you could even further tweak your images/ image sequences using adjustments and filters.

Mylenium

[riki]

There's a good video tut about this exact thing over at the DV Garage site, you need to register and login in. Look in the Attention 2 Detail section under 'Tutorials'. I think they use data from a particle emitter to displace a section of the image, which is done in the compositing APP. There example uses a heat exhaust outlet on the rooftop of a building.

re http://www.dvgarage.com

[richpr]

Also the distortion in the air behind a bullet in 'bullet time'... the air gets disturbed or the light/rays in that area get refracted...

Search for those tutorials, I saw one which discussed that effect in that context... Same thing basically... Could be a shape with an animated texture hanging above a pan or a road or behind a bullet...

[onslaught]

there is a program by worley name TAFT that could do the heatwave effect. check it out on (www.worley.com). I think that's the site.

[wacom]

If you recieved DFX+ you should also be able to do this inside of DFX+ with the diffrent space warp tools. It shouldn't be too hard if you do have it as you could do something simple like add a grid warp behind or around the area in the image/video you need, animate it for a few seconds and then set that animation spline to a loop or ping/pong motion in the Splline editor. You'll need to add a certain amount of blur etc. as well. Hell even if you have DFX+ or a similar program you should read a tut.

If you're trying to do it in AE 5.5 there is a tutorial in the newest version of the Creating Motion Graphics in After Effects book series by Trish Meyer. Here is a link to it http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-1578202078-0

Hope this helps in some way...

:(

[JDaniel]

You can model the basic shape, make it transparent and give it an animated noise on the refraction index layer. Just an idea. :D