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I’m missing something with caustics. Help?
This is my first attempt at caustics in AE. I’ve read Jim’s tutorial here, which is great, but I just want caustics on the logo I’ve imported. I can’t get the effect to work on just the opaque part of a logo. It ignores the transparency and applies caustics to the entire rectangular file. It looks like the logo is printed on clear plastic and that it is all underwater as one item. By turning off diffuse and specular in the material section, (which I don’t really want to do), I was able to get it to almost do what I want, but it’s still making the entire rectangle darker.
I tried a png file, ai file, and even text created within AE itself.
Basically, I already have a clip of underwater footage and I want the logo to appear as if it were floating in it. The underwater clip already has it’s own caustics, naturally. I don’t want to add to it.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Gary -
2 Replies
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perhaps you don’t want Caustics but a displacement map. Use the same water footage as a source displacement map for the logo layer.
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Actually I do want caustics as well as displacement. Both are possible in the caustics filter while only displacement is possible in the displacement filter. But I only want displacement and caustics on the text or logo only.
So, based on your recommendation, am I to assume that the caustics filter only allows effects to the entire scene, from the layer you apply it to and down, and not just the layer you’re applying it to? If that’s truly the case, I’ll use a work around. Otherwise, I’d like to know how to make this work for the future. (I’ve already finished that job, but I will be needing this again on another project for the same client.)
Thanks again,
Gary
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