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Animated Displacement Map Question
I wondering if anyone can give me any tips.
I am working on a project where I am attempting to “project” an image onto clouds as if you were looking up into the sky and seeing them as projected from a light source below.
I have my clouds layer and want it to drift slowly in a certain direction. I am wondering how I can have my other images (the ones to be “projected”) displaced by the gradient of my clouds layer so that the images appear to be affected by the shape of the drifting clouds.
I tried simply using an instance of the cloud layer as a displacement map but soon figured out that this wouldn’t work as apparently a displacement map cannot be animated. The problem is that even if I precompose the motion of the clouds the displacement map does not seem to be independent of the object to be displaced.. that is to say, basically I just want a foreground layer to be displaced by a moving background layer. Any suggestions? Shall I just forget the displacement and use light transmition and blending modes instead?
Cheers!
Cosmo -
5 Replies
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You should precomp your displacement map layer.
Steve
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A displacement layer can definitely be animated. You may need to pre-comp the dismap layer, as Steve suggested.
It’s also possible that the dismap is not scaled to fit and is displacing the wrong part of your layer. If the dismap and layer to be displaced are different sizes this is a common problem.
cheers,
Jim——————
Jim Tierney
Digital Anarchy
http://www.digitalanarchy.com
415-586-8434 -
Thanks for the posts guys.
What I really want to do is animate a certain layer and have its displacement affected by the current color values of the layer underneath it (as it may or may not be animated itself)Sounds like there should be a very simple way to do this – the problem is when I use a displacement map on my top layer it actually embeds the selected map to the top layer. I understand how pre-comping the animated map would give animated displacement motion but I want it to be able to continually change as I move the displaced image around.
Is the only way to do this to actually keyframe my top layer motion along the (visual representation of my) displacement map and then precomp that same motion path to the animated map so they match?
It just seems like there should be a simpler way – am I missing something?
Cheers!
Cosmo -
Lol, man, I really must be missing SOMETHING.. but to answer your question yes, I am.
So then I am thinking about this right, right? Maybe I’m experiencing an annoying program glitch.Cheers!
Cosmo -
Hey Cosmo,
Were you ever able to achieve the desired effect on this? I’m trying to do something very similar, and I’d love to see a sample render or project file.
(for the benefit of people that didn’t read the rest of the thread, Cosmo was trying to project an image onto a cloud using displacement maps)
Regards,
RobRob Wolf
OyBaby LLC
https://www.oybaby.com
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