Turbulence displacement

[daninski]

HI all, I sometimes use Turbulence displacement in AE to create a fake boil when I have a clean ink line. Is there an equivalent effect in TVP anyone uses? I've had a look but I can't see anything that would be practical.

TIA!

Dan

[slowtiger]

Not as simple as a press of a button, but quite manageable:

Use FX -> Distortion -> Displacement Mapping with a layer of animated noise as source. I just did a test with some paper scans I had, increased contrast, enlarged and blurred it (see image, that's the whole frame). FX settings depth = 10, Smooth = 2. You can prepare several "noise loops" with different grain size for different results (for close-ups and wide angle), just a second each is more than enough. The result flickers a bit, maybe set the noise to 2's. If you need smoother boiling, you could prepare a really animated texture.

Of couse you get a better result if you draw with an animated brush in the first place which gives you a good random width line each time.

[daninski]

Yeah, it's not for the actual frames of animation. I do boil stuff myself where possible
It's for holds. Some of the budgets for some commissioned stuff aren't big enough to spend time boiling everything on threes.

An example of the turbulence displacement would be for this thing that I animated on for a friend

https://vimeo.com/271103518 and this https://vimeo.com/296387870 You have to have it full screen and HQ to see the boil mind!

I'll try your method now.

[daninski]

Ok, displacement mapping with a 4 point plasma animation worked quite well actually. Thanks!

[slowtiger]

Glad to be able to help.

[D.T. Nethery]

To get a subtle Line Boil effect I can use a layer of animated "noise" over top of the line art layer with the noise layer set to blend mode Overlay2. It works to make the line boil, but then I can't merge the noise layer with the line art layer , so it's not possible to fill the line art layer with color (either a regular ANIM Layer or CTG layer) because the animated noise also affects the color layer. Is there a better way to do this ?

[slowtiger]

There's always confusion about which FX only work with a white fill and which work also with lines on transparent. I'm used to fill the frames with white, apply the FX, merge layers when needed, and finally apply scan cleaner.

[D.T. Nethery]

There's always confusion about which FX only work with a white fill and which work also with lines on transparent. I'm used to fill the frames with white, apply the FX, merge layers when needed, and finally apply scan cleaner.

Indeed it is confusing.

Thanks for reminding me about filling the line art frames with white , then I add my Noisy Turbulence layer over top of the white filled line art layer set to blend mode Overlay2 to get line boiling effect working . THEN , merge the Noisy Turbulence layer with the white filled line art layer, then run Scan Cleaner to make the now boiling line art transparent again so it can be filled with color. A rather roundabout way of working it out , but it does work !

[D.T. Nethery]

I sometimes use Turbulence displacement in AE to create a fake boil when I have a clean ink line. Is there an equivalent effect in TVP ?

I wanted to mention here that it would be great if a "Line Boil" FX would be added to the FX Stack as a standard feature, so a range of selected frames could have line boil turbulence applied to it and there is a sliding percentage scale to adjust the amount of line boil.

[D.T. Nethery]

Here is another Line Boil Test. I used a layer of "Noisy Turbulence" , set to blend mode Overlay 2. The held line art layer had a very subtle amount of jitter applied using the Shaker FX (X = 0.1 ,Y =0.2), I also applied the Warp Grid distortion FX to have the character "breathing". (this wasn't entirely successful, but it's just intended as a quick test. I would refine the breathing if this was an actual production scene)
The line art layer had a white fill , so the noisy turbulence layer would show , then I merged the line art layer with the noisy turbulence layer , then applied Scan Cleaner to the merged layer. Then added color.

[mox]

I quickly tried using Brush Spreading FX, although it works nice for adding pixels around plain shapes of any kind, it's not easy to get a clean result when applied to ink lines.

So there's maybe another lead to follow with the help of other FX in order to erode and to blur in a second step?