• Adobe After Effects

  Viewing a Displacement Map in 3D – Is It Possible?

  Posted by Ryan Beaton on June 30, 2018 at 4:11 am

  I’m trying to create an old kind of CRT effect on a hologram I’ve created and mapped to a face. I’ve got the effect down, including a masked displacement map that pans down the screen to create a sort of panning glitch effect. It works exactly the way I want it to… until I make the precomp 3D (to give the elements of the hologram depth when the face it’s mapped to rotates or tilts or whatever).

  Going into the precomp, I can see that the fractal noise layer I’m using as the displacement map source is 3D, but the displacement effect itself appears straight on parallel to the screen, regardless of where the camera is viewing the hologram from.

  Is there some way to make it so that the displacement effect follows the hologram properly in 3D space?

  
  This is what the source layer looks like, with the masked fractal noise layer making its way down the screen.

  
  This is what the effect ends up looking like. I guess since you can only displace on the X and Y planes, AE doesn’t know how to translate that to the Z plane…

  Thanks!

  Blaise Douros replied 8 years ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Kalleheikki Kannisto

  July 1, 2018 at 4:28 pm

  You need something like Trapcode Mir or Freeform Pro for 3D displacement.

  Kalleheikki Kannisto
  Senior Graphic Designer
• 

  Blaise Douros

  July 3, 2018 at 11:42 pm

  You just need to precompose again, and include the displacement map in that. The final precomp, with the displacement baked in, is what you should place in 3D space.
• 

  Ryan Beaton

  July 5, 2018 at 4:20 am

  Thanks for the suggestion!

  Unfortunately, I tried that, and it works to be able to rotate the precomp in 3D space and have the displacement map follow it, but it’s once I collapse transformations, in order to be able to properly see the depth of the text layers and everything, that the displacement map stops working properly.

  I’m thinking I’d need a third party plugin, like Kalleheikki was saying. That’s fine, I just wanted to know it was possible in some way. Not worth it for this project, but good to know for the future.

  Thanks again!
• 

  Blaise Douros

  July 5, 2018 at 5:24 pm

  You could also just use the same displacement map source to affect multiple layers, and rather than precomposing them with collapsed transformations, parent the individually displaced layers together in the main comp for motion. That way they will all displace the same way, and move together.

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