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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects CC Ripple Pulse in 3D?

  • CC Ripple Pulse in 3D?

    Posted by John Corbett on August 5, 2009 at 10:50 pm

    Searched around and didn’t see anything addressing this, so apologies in advance if this is an easy fix.

    I’m trying to create a shockwave effect that is effectively a wave distorting the footage behind it. It radiates out from a character’s hand when he slaps the ground. CC Ripple Pulse in CS3 creates the effect I’m looking for, but limits it to a strictly 2D pulse. Since the angle of the camera in the physical shot is about 45 degrees, I’d like to try and make the pulse seem to slide across the floor, sort of like when you turn the grid to the “ice” setting in Particle World. Here’s the base effect, whereas what I need is for it to slide along the ground:

    Unfortunately, nothing I’ve tried works. I began by applying the Ripple Pulse to an adjustment layer and making that 3D, but that didn’t work. Then I duplicated the footage, applied the effect, and made that 3D, which got me the right angle, but I couldn’t come up with a layer mode that applied it appropriately to the original footage.

    Can anyone think of a way to make CC Ripple Pulse 3D? Or failing that, a way to get a similar effect that can be made 3D? Thanks in advance!

    John Corbett replied 16 years, 9 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Kevin Camp

    August 6, 2009 at 3:15 pm

    you’re probably looking at having to create your own using the displacement map effect and a layer map of radiating circles in the perspective you need.

    displacement map uses another image to create the distortion, so the tricky part is creating that layer map. you may be able to us the radio waves or wave world effect on a solid to create the rings then rotating the solid to match the perspective you need. when creating the wave animation keep in mind that the displacement map effect will displace light pixel one direction and dark pixel the other, 50% gray pixel will not get displaced.

    however you create the perspective ring animation, you’ll need to precomp it to use with the displacement map effect. once precomp’ed, apply the displacement map effect to the footage (or to an adjustment layer over the footage) and select the wave animation as the layer map and set how much displacement you want.

    Kevin Camp
    Senior Designer
    KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

  • David Bogie

    August 6, 2009 at 3:19 pm

    Try searching the AE tutorial sites for pusle and shockwave.

    About the only thing I can think of to try in AE is use your ripple pulse on a grayscale and use that as the input for a displacement/compound effect. You could make this into a 3D scene, make the pulse layer large enough to place it in front of the background plate, tip it to camera. Your displacement will not be 3D but the scene passing through it will appear to be distorted in 3D.

    bogiesan

  • John Corbett

    August 7, 2009 at 7:46 pm

    Thanks for the advice, Kevin – it worked great! I ended up using the Displacement Map effect with an expanding ellipse from the Generate menu. Making that 3D allowed me to view the expansion at any angle. It’s not quite as smooth as Ripple Pulse, on account of that effect having a sort of puckered “after-wave” but it still does the trick. Here are some stills:

    No FX:

    Displacement map with Fast Blur:

    Full FX:

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