cool tools for cool artists  beyond animation
Animated Swap Buffers
Tutorials

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 Here's another quick look at how you can easily use an animation - any animation - i.e. an image sequence or AVI file or a new animation you create from scratch, and select it to become an animated displacement map or an animated composition through the Swap buffer.
Start with an Animation
 For example, let's say you use the Timeline editor from the Animation menu, and render the Perlin noise filter.

click for larger image ^


Perhaps you'll want to throw additional filters at it, like a Sobel edge effect, a snowfall filter or numerous other effects.





Save it as a Dogwaffle Animation file
(*.dwa file)
Now select the Save... item from the Animation menu.








This will let you specify a filename to save it as.
Get the main animation
Now you can load the main animation, or create one. That's the animation (or video) which you want to have transformed (displaced) or combined with the one you just saved as .dwa file.

Select the Displace filter from the Timeline editor.
Selecting an animation as Swap
In the menubar of the Timeline editor, select "Use anim as swap..." from the Animation menu


Pick the .dwa file saved earlier:

Select the effect which uses Swap
Set the amount of displacement

You can now scrub through the animation in the timeline to preview the effect that the Swap animation has on the main animation, as shown in the preview area.


You might optionally change some parameters of the chosen filter (e.g. the 'Mac displace' slider in the case of the Displace filter). You could keyframe these changes.

Then, simply hit the Render button to apply.

That's it, in a nutshell. The trick now is to find or generate some neat looking effects by making the right type of animated displacement maps. And that's  where your imagination comes in.