Heat Wave effect?

#1

Hey does anyone know a good tutorial on creating a heat wave effect with max and combustion. Thanks in advance

#2

Theres a couple of methods I know work well, you just need to decide whether you need a truly 3d effect, or whether a 2d fake in post will do.

a good 3d one involves creating some splines where you want the heatwave to be, assign noise to them & turn on their object motion blur. You either have the splines set as renderable, & invisible to camera, or as unrenderable (Its been a while since I used Max, I cant remember, try both ways & see)

The other involves using one of combustions particle systems as the source for a displacement on your source footage. It looks good, buit can bea bit of work if there are obscuring objects that need to be roto’d out, or if there are complex camera moves

#3

Thanks Chris I’ll try the combustion trick. My 3D animation is toon shaded so I’m goign for the 2d Look.

#4

in that case you may not want to do a displacement at all, but rather a series of lines, or cartoon smoke or something - it may fit with the theme of your composition more - either way you could use the particle system (maybe some rain, turned onto its side & stretched, or some smoke, partially transparent, followed by a colour correction operator to ‘super contrast’ it, & make it cartoony… :slight_smile:

#5

…or just use the “Cartoon Smoke” particle setting… :wink:

#6

er, yeah, or use that cartoon smoke setting, I knew about that one, Oh yes I did! :smiley:

#7

Thanks a lot guys

#8

You can check www.dvgarage.com tutorials section for a good heat effect tutorial…

#9

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