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

Ok, we're now ready for the big moment: animated displacement by swap. We have the main movie clip, and we have the animated clip of displacement to simulate rising hot air.

Load your main movie, i.e the one which you want to displace to add a turbulent rising hot air effect to it. In our example,

it's that desert view with the camera sweep from the Sun down to the sand dunes and motion to the left

If you have it as a DWA (Dogwaffle Animation) file, use menu

Animation > Open...

or else use the AVI loader or the option in the same Animation menu to load an image sequence.

Or of course if so far you didn't have your base movie clip created, make one now. Perhaps one of moving clouds on the Sky file?

Then open the Timeline editor as before, from the Animationmenu:

Animation > Timeline...

In the Timeline's menubar (since PD Pro 4.1) you'll find a new option in the Animation menu:

(Timeline)Animation > Use anim as swap...

Use this option to select the DWA file containing the rising bubbles animation we just created in the prior step and which we saved as .dwa animation file.

Select the animation file that contains the turbulent rising hot air simulation's displacement (greymap)

Now that this animation is selected as the animated Swap source, several filters in the Timeline will use it, instead of the normal static image from the Swap buffer.

These include the "Combine with Swap" filters (of which there are many variants) as well as the "Displace by Swap".

Select the 'Displace' filkter, and make sure that the 'Mac displace' slider is not at zero.

Then click Render, and you will see, in the preview, that the animated displacement map is affecting the original animation as it's rendering the displacement filter's effect with each frame from the selected animation.

Here's what the result could look like

(note that this is the version still showing the slight size reduction as a result of the Scale transform and SPline interpolation overshoot - this can of course be fixed by cropping to the center area and eliminating the black borders that appear along the middle of the animation)

Here's another example:

The camel was quickly modeled in Archipelis by tracing a photograph, then it was composed in 3D within Carrara for a sunset view, and the single rendered image was turned in PD Pro into an animation, and the displacement created with the animated rising bubbles map from the prior step.