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#After effects particle playground smoke full
#After effects particle playground smoke software
#After effects particle playground smoke windows

Under Gravity, set Force to 0.0 to prevent the default fountain effect.The larger the Barrel Radius, the more particles needed. I chose 50, only because 720, the width of the frame, would require many more particles and slow down the example. Open up Barrel Radius from the default of 0.0 to the width, in pixels, of the source.Under Cannon, move Position to the source in the frame where the heat haze originates (in this case, the bottom center, but it could even be out of frame).Thankfully, this effect requires only a few simple adjustments: The help documents are thorough, but there are dozens of pages of documentation.

#After effects particle playground smoke full

Unfortunately, Particle Playground is generally slow to render and cumbersome, full of not-quite-intuitive properties. Particle Playground is perfectly adequate for this type of use, and it is included with After Effects Professional. A subtle effect, the heat displacement has been laid over a checkerboard where it is clearly visible traveling up the center of the image. Setting up the particles is potentially the trickiest part, and of course the settings are unique for each scene.įigure 14.14. You can easily see the results even in a still image (Figure 14.14). On the book's DVD, 14_heatDisplacement.aep contains the effect applied over a checkerboard background.

Add an adjustment layer containing the Displacement Map effect, which should be set to use the particle animation comp to create the distortion effect, and apply it to the background.

Make two similar but unique passes of this particle animationone to displace the background vertically, the other to displace it horizontallyand precompose them.

Create a basic particle animation that simulates the movement and dissipation of hot air particles in the scene.

The basic steps for re-creating heat distortion from an invisible source in After Effects are Therefore it's a perfectly appropriate compositing effect, useful when there is an object in the scene capable of generating a significant amount of hot air. In any case, this effect behaves like an overlaid distortion on top of whatever lays beyond the hot air from the point of view of the camera.

#After effects particle playground smoke software

However, 3D software generally does not take into account the role of air in a shot. You might assume, therefore, that a physics model devised in 3D animation software would be more accurate than faking this effect in 2D.

#After effects particle playground smoke windows

This creates ripples that have the effect of displacing and distorting what is behind the moving air, just like ripples in the pool or ripples in the windows of an old house. This "lens" is typically static and appears flat, but the application of heat causes an abrupt mixture of fast-moving hot air particles rising into cooler ambient air. Air is not a perfectly clear medium but a translucent gas that can act as a lens. It can be useful to generate heat distortion particles in 3D animation software, when the distortion needs to be attached to a 3D animated object, such as a jet engine or rocket exhaust.Īs you know from basic physics, hot air rises and hot particles move faster than cool ones. There are cases in which our atmosphere behaves like this as well, when ripples are caused in it by the collision of warmer and cooler air, a medium which is not quite as transparent as it seems. Rippled waves in the water cause rippled bending of light. Stare into a swimming pool, and you can see displacement caused by the bending of light as it travels through the water. A comparison with an unaltered shot of the building (b) emphasizes the amount of distortion. The effect of heat haze has been added to the general mayhem being issued by the helicopter (a). When the fire itself is in the shot and you can see through it or anywhere above it, you expect the fire to heavily distort whatever is visible behind its heat.įigures 14.13a and b. This adds to the visceral reality of the shot, whether it's a desert exterior, a day at the racetrack, jet engine exhaust, or all three (which describes the pod race sequence from Star Wars pretty well). When your eye sees heat distortion, it understands that the environment is dynamic, containing an abrupt mix of hot air with cold air. Its rippling effect adds to the dynamism or chaos of the scene. Like a lens flare, it's a highly visible effect that, if properly motivated and adjusted, lends realism to your scene rather than distracting from its story.įigures 14.13a and b show the fabricated results of heat distortion in a scene. Heat distortion, that strange rippling in the air that occurs when hot air is dissipated into cooler air, is another one of those effects compositors love.