Heat Haze

[Darby Edelen]

Try using a particle system or two. I prefer Trapcode Particular, but Particle Playground will work for this purpose.

What you want is to have one particle system shooting out red particles and the other shooting out green, pre-comp these and (optionally) change their blend modes to Add (this will result in yellow where the 2 particles overlap). These particles will be your heat distortion.

Now use the pre-comp for the Distort>Displacement Map effect in your final comp. Displacement Map will use Red by default for horizontal distortions and Green for vertical distortions (hence the red and green particles).

As Dave suggested, you can also use Fractal Noise with rapid evolution and some vertical translation to add a little bit of global, but more uniform, distortion.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Mark]

Also you can use a compound blur with a wiggle on the amount, and have it use the same map (fractal) as the displacment map…you can also creat a duplicate of the fractal map comp and slightly offset it to create a different effect.

[David Bogie]

Needlessly pedantic correction:
Heat haze is a distortion/refraction optical effect. It is not a blur.

Interested in the physics? Look up Schlieran effect

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=Schlieren+effect&spell=1

bogiesan

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

If you click on my head at the top of the forum, you’ll find a lot of tutorials – 3 of them are devoted to displacement maps, and 3 are devoted to fractal noise. That should give you the knowledge needed to do this effect.

Aharon Rabinowitz
Email: arabinowitz (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
All Bets Are Off Productions, Inc.
Creative Cow After Effect Podcast
Internet Killed the Video Star: A Guide to Creating Video for the Web

[Darby Edelen]

[bogiesan] “Heat haze is a distortion/refraction optical effect. It is not a blur. “

While this may be true, the compound blur route can yield better looking results… After all, why settle for reality when we can have BETTER than reality? (;

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA