[Steve Bentley]

Deformation is deformation so whether you are using mograph or a shader or the deformer version, it ends up doing the same thing (splits the mesh into a bazzillion polys and shifts them based on luminance).
The only better deformation solution is to use Octane where the deformer there is basically alien technology.
As for procedural, you might be able to generate a noise pattern via code that looks like tire treads and then that would be resolution independent (you could use Coffee in Expresso for that or python).
The other thing to try is a leaf shader. There are a few around. If you simplified the leaf pattern down to a diamond and scattered that it might do the trick.

And having thought of that, what about using a spline to define a basic element of a tire pattern (like a fat Z – one of the repeating elements that works its way around the tire), extrude that, then use mograph to scatter those shapes in linear arrays, then use all of that as a displacer?
This would probably be easier in R20 now that we have fields to work with as effectors.
This would give you infinite resolution for the displacer and would only be limited by the mesh of the plane. In the end, that’s your resolution choke point anyway so a procedural solution might be overkill – in the end its all about how many polys the plane has.

[Steve Bentley]

Or you can use a compositing tag and tell the sphere to not show in the camera and to not cast shadows (is it blocking the light perhaps – make the sphere really really big). You can also exclude the sphere from the main light’s project tab so it doesn’t blow out the luma map.

If you can use an HDRI texture in the sphere’s luma channel (assuming a Global Illumination (GI) render) that will give you a better reflection than a standard 8 bit image (often you have to mix down the luma channel’s image with a standard black luma color so the HDRI doesn’t light the scene like a thousand suns)
But if you go the GI route, the addition of the overhead light is almost swimming against the current. With GI, the scene is getting its light and shadows from the texture in the sphere’s luma map. If you need to art direct lighting, its often better to add a disk object and add an hdri map that is a basic circular or square radiating gradient to the luma map for the disk and move that around in the scene like a bounce reflector on a photo shoot. That disk “becomes” a light.

[Steve Bentley]

You could use the deformation tab in the material. It does mean you have to subdmesh the plane (the material has settings for that so you don’t have to deal with all those dense polys in the viewport – the submeshing only happens at render time).
Depending on your textures you may have to blur them slightly so that you get a nice rounded “bump”. Go easy on the settings – depending on your scene scale it only takes a few digits to get a good deformation.
Depending on lighting bumps can work, but usually deformations (if you can afford the render hit) look better.
You can also use the deformation effector in Mograph or the deformation deformer to “bake” the polys into a mesh and save that out as an object. You can also just bake the texture and the deformation into the object with texture baking and then the system reads that cache at each render and saves the deformation time. This approach works great if the shadows aren’t changing over time or for a still.

[Steve Bentley]

If that doesn’t do it for you can you post a few stills to show what you are getting?

[Steve Bentley]

Ah got you.
I normally tie the tracking value (set to “before and after”) to the scale value via a pick wip and then a slider to adjust the offset.
This way as it scales the tracking also increases keeping everything at the correct distance.

[Steve Bentley]

Do you have the text paragraph settings also set to “centered”?

[Steve Bentley]

Not sure what kind of call outs you need but with this new method in your quiver check out the Video Copilot saber effect – its Beam on steroids! (if by steroids you mean sizzling glowing light saber steroids!)

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/saber_plug-in/

[Steve Bentley]

More importantly, light is additive, so use a Screen blend/transfer function (or Add if you are in 32 bit space) to add things like this to your background. The issue with this is that light stuff behind can blow out the effect. But that’s the nature of how light works (go look at a match flame in broad daylight against a light background or a propane torch flame).
To help it along, something that bright would be lighting up the ground and the characters and probably producing lens flares in the lens. The added bonus of lens flares is they change the base black of the background in the scene and help tie things together.
All hail JJ.

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Richard,
Its pretty subtle. If you monitor gamma is a little low it might not even show

[Steve Bentley]

couple of things:
First ,did you track the camera movement? It might be that the smoke is not “moving with” the camera. (I can see some keyframed motion there so that might be it)
Second, when she lets the gun fall there would be air current eddies which would disturb the smoke and probably pull on the bottom and curl it.
Third, there is a blue light from above (glinting off the barrel) that would add to the color of the smoke and the smoke would get brighter as it gets closer to this light.
Fourth, is the smoke included in the rack focus or at the same focus level as the barrel tip?
FInally, it might need more motion blur on the smoke, that adds its own motion to the camera move motion.

All of these things our eye knows intrinsically but doesn’t always know what’s wrong when they aren’t there. But really, that’s picking at nits. Given that you used particle playground instead of Particular or something more exotic, that’s pretty darned good.