Displacement maps

[lister007]

Hey everyone, haven't been in the forums for a while but looks like mostly same old same old , but anyway, what I would like is to know how creative you guys get without any footage at all in avisynth, what I would like is some ideas for displacement maps with out any original footage. Now this will be used for time and space so whatever you want to do.

[Zarxrax]

I've used them before in a few videos. I don't think theres really a WHOLE lot of interesting things you can do with them though. The main thing they are probably used for is an "invisible person" effect, where you can just see some displacement around where some invisible person is moving :p
It can also be used for warping backgrounds in interesting ways, or warping an image as viewed through water droplets or something like that (I used it like that in my tetris video a few years back).

Also, something that is perhaps not known by many people--the Caustics filter in after effects also works as a displacement map filter. It can do a few things that you cant do with the normal filter.

Here are a few tutorials on things you can do with displacement map:
Creating Fire: http://library.creativecow.net/articles ... e/fire.php
Invisible Man: http://library.creativecow.net/articles ... le_man.php
Caustics: http://library.creativecow.net/articles ... ustics.php
General Usage: http://library.creativecow.net/articles ... cement.php

A 3 part video tutorial: http://library.creativecow.net/articles ... ement1.php
http://library.creativecow.net/articles ... ement2.php
http://library.creativecow.net/articles ... ement3.php

[Zarxrax]

Gah, I thought this was the Adobe forum
Avisynth, eh? Interesting.

You might be able to get some interesting maps using the subtract() filter. You could then play around with some blur on that, and play with the levels. Something like Colorbars() or histogram() might get you some interesting stuff to play with. You can try merging them together in various ways using effects like Overlay() and flipvertical() or fliphorizontal().

Some 3rd party plugins that might give some interesting effects are:
Warpsharp or aWarpsharp
EffectsMany
FreeFrame
Videoscope
( 3rd party plugins found at: http://avisynth.org/warpenterprises/ )

[lister007]

Yeah I am very familiar with displacement maps, no help needed there unfortunately but what I have originally tried was colour bars which I changed to a monchrome to get the effect I wanted, I know there is alot of guys and gals though who can do incredible things with avisynth and was wondering what sorta suggestion they had, I hadn't though of overlaying in avisynth before though, that could have real potential.

What I want ideally is something simple not to warp to much though, what you said about using caustics is what I had in mind really but then I got thinking, about avisynth generating the filter. Now I'm starting to think blender could throw in something new entirely.......