Fabric waving effect from Jpeg, anyone know how?

[Michael Szalapski]

You could use a displacement map driven by a precomposed layer with Turbulent Noise (or Fractal Noise). Then you would use another copy of that precomp to add in shadows and highlights. It would have to be tweaked and played with, but you could get a decent effect from it.

Or there’s always this.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Brian Charles]

Depending on how you want the fabric to look you can use several techniques that don’t rely on 3rd party plug ins.

You’ll need to create a displacement map using either fractal noise or wave world. What you want is a gray scale image showing the the light and shadow of the fabric, you can use the evolution options in Fractal Noise to animate. Look for tutorials on curtains etc there are several out there including a new one on the Cow. Once you have the displacement map looking the way you want apply the Diplacement Map effect to the fabric layer and set the displacement map layer to the fractal layer.

To add shading you can composite the fabric with the fractal layer. Here is a sample in CS4.

464_fabricdisplacefolder.zip

[Brian Charles]

Low res coarse fabric sample.

[Danny Winn]

Wow that’s exactly what I need it to look like Brian, is there a tutorial on that one somewhere? I searched The Cow but didn’t find one. Not sure what words to search though.

Can you direct me to how that was achieved Brian or did you do that yourself with the technique you described?

Please advise.

Thank you too Michael, I’ll try that as well

[Brian Charles]

I posted an example after effects file in the post prior to the last one. Its done in CS4. You should be able to open it in After Effects.

Here is the link: 464_fabricdisplacefolder.zip

To create the effect I used the curtains animation preset and made a few adjustments. I removed the tritone effect and changed the brightness and contrast settings to taste. Then I added an expression to drive the evolution basically “time*50”.

I precomped that layer and added the fabric image (you could precomp the fabric with your logo on top) and then applied the Displacement Map effect setting the displace layer to the fractal noise precomp and using the luminance from that layer to drive bot the horizontal and vertical displacement. I think I used a setting of 3 or 4 in each dimension. Those settings would need to change depending on your footage and comp size.

[Danny Winn]

Alright! very cool. Thanks Brian I will give this a try. Really appreciate it, thanks! Might have some more questions while attempting though;)

[Brian Charles]

No worries. I just searched the Cow and see that Aharon Rabinowitz has 3 tutorials on displacement maps, might be a good place to start.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/displacement1.php

[Danny Winn]

Hmmm?
I must be missing something. I’m following this tut exactly but my image does not do what the Tuts does.

I import my logo, then create a new solid and apply the curtains effect,and change the curtain colors to B&W. My logo IS on top like the Tut.

I then add displacement map to my logo and direct it to the animated Curtain solid.

The only thing that happens is that my Logo image appears to move slightly off center. I can’t see the curtain moving through my logo like it does in the Tut.

Am I supposed to mess with the Modes at all, both are set to Normal. I’ve tried diferent modes but nothing effects my logo.

Oh, and when I try increasing the Vert or Horiz displacement it just make my whole logo image move sideways or up and down

Any ideas?

[Michael Szalapski]

You forgot to precompose it first.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Danny Winn]

Ah of course, that Tut does not even mention to pre-compose. Looks like he started the tut after he already precomposed it. Oops, that’s a pretty big thing to leave out.

Thanks.