Digital Painting Software - tutorials with PD Pro Digital Painter 4.1: post work special effects movie specialFX holywood style effects, rising air, turbulent water, animated displacement mapping

Desert Heat

Doing Post Work over 3D animations with PD Pro 4.1:
Adding turbulent rising air, and lens flares,
to your CG Animation

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intro

In many instances, after you've rendered an animation with your 3D program, whether it's Carrara, Bryce, Lightwave, Animation Master or any of the several popular entry-level or high-end CGI tools, the fun and challenge has just begun: you may have forgotten to enable lensflares (or the program doesn't offer them). You may need to enhance color contrast, turn it into a sunset mood, add cold foggy moisture, or other side effects of mother nature.

In this example, DAZ's Carrara 5.1 was used with one of its numerous pre-defined 3D scenes, namely that of a desert landscape. The Sun initially didn't have much glare, no lens flares were present, and most importantly, the air was stagnant.

PD Pro can be used to add the look of turbulent hot air rising and distorting the view.

click to enlarge

So how was this accomplished? And what did we start with? Here's the original animation:

Notice that the camera is initially pointed at the Sun above, and almost immediately starts wandering down to the horizon and then drifts to the left. It would be good to have a few seconds of additional still camera view before the move down starts. It would also be good to extend the final view with another second or two, i.e. 60 more frames of the last view's frame, before we start adding lens flares, turbulence and such.

click to enlarge

Got a Mac? You can run Project Dogwaffle and many other Windows-only softwares if you have a Windows installation CD, with Parallels Destop for Mac

>>> Coming Soon: an 8-step tutorial on how to do this easily with PD Pro 4.1