Heat haze effect in EIAS

[fantomaz]

Hi all,

i am in the need of a good looking FX: Heat Haze

You can find tons of tutorials for Combustion, Shake and of course AE,

but i cant go down for 6 month in the cellar to learn that beasts.

If there was a good tutorial for Motion, probably i would ;) :angel:

But hey, heat haze is a kind of refraction, so why not doing it in 3D?

Ok, thinking, deeeeeep thinking....very deep! Once upon a time there was...hmmm,

i remember that there was a tutorial about 'Heat', somewhere on the internet.

The name of the site had to do with "electro" — BINGO!

Long ago there was a real good site with lots of tips and tuts: 'electro303'

ok, lets google this, found it!

You can still reach it, but.... ok, here is the link: electro303

The tutorials are there and i found the Heat-one, but PITA, you need

a special shader: BOrganic from Konkeptoine. But i dont have that

shader, too bad. The author of that tutorial had an alternative, but

maybe i can do it with an other shader with the (nearly) same functionality

as BOrganic?

Otherwise i have to do the suggested other method.

Thanks for any tipps!

Alex

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Alex!

Haze effects are “almost” done in compositing only, I never did it full in 3d :)

Maybe a group “the Haze” with wave deformations and some refraction and transparencies?

Thanks

Tom

[AVTPro]

I haven't done one but it's definitely some type of 2D blurred displacement with turbulence.

[fantomaz]

Hi all,

after 2 days of tweaking and testing here are the results.

I decided to render in passes, because rendertimes are too high to render

with the effect active (12 minutes per frame).

So first the scene without any effects, rendertime is 2 minutes per frame at 1280x720,

4 million polys.

I then took the rendered clip and placed him as a texture on a flat plane as a "background movie"

in a new project (because the displacement effect wont touch the normal backgroundmovie when

using rotoscoping). Used the same camera position as in the first project of course.

Now i used a hemisphere as in the tutorial described above: 100% transparent, no specular, no reflectivity,

disabled cast/receive shadow and disabled cast reflection. In the displacement channel

i put the shader NoiseFactory, so the shader will displace the hemisphere. Over 10 seconds

i animated the y offset of that shader from 10 to -10 that there is some up movement of the displacement.

Rendertimes is 7 seconds per frame!

Down the road

Please dont look for the (not correct) movement of that car, i only needed something which is coming

straight to the cameras eye for that test. In the final shot the Cobra will definitely drive correct :angel:

Alex

Edited May 16, 2012 by fantomaz
typo

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Alex!!

Excelent test!!!

Thanks

Tom

[fantomaz]

Next one!

This time i did not use a hemisphere as the displacement, this time

i used only small planes where i want the effect to be happened.

With this setting you could control much better where and at which

speed, turbulence and so on the effect is visible in the shot - just like

with a mask in AE or 2D general. But, and this is a very important 'but' for me,

you can control much better where the car "drives" out of the effect!

A little color correction in FCE - done.

Rendertime per frame: 1 second at 1280x720 (i like that :shy: )

Down the Road II

Alex

[FelixCat]

Very nice, Alex. The second one sells pretty well the Heat Haze. Good work!

FelixCat

[Tomas Egger]

Ola,

Cool Alex!!

Thanks

Tom

[RichardJoly]

I simply use a large pane of glass deformed with an animated bump map. Vary its position to control where you want the effect to start.

I used this heatwave trick to show heat from motors, boiling pot etc. and it is quite effective on the palm beach scene.

Varying the bump/displacement size and the refraction index of the glass gives you quite a nice control over the effect.

Movie:

http://rdnmultimedia.com//eias/heatHaze.mov

Animated map:

http://rdnmultimedia.com//eias/heatHazeUp.mov

Render times are reasonable.

[AVTPro]

The second one "down the road" is perfect. I thought the first one had a little too much distortion but the second one even feels like heat.

[fantomaz]

Thanks for all your comments! The first one, also the second, is only a test.

Sure, the second one looks good, but overall there are some things missing.

The cam is too far away from the car, the ground is too "flat", no rocks, pebbles

and sand on the ground...

But for a test its ok, i will investigate further.

Alex