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JULY 24, 2003 Holy Displacement Map! Doing your own superhero movie? How the heck do we “Normals” summon our heroes in the time of need? Batman used the Bat Signal. In this Adobe After Effects Pro exercise, we’ll create our own Bat Signal reflecting off the clouds.
In the case of animating a displacement map (what we are doing in this exercise) a few things need to be taken into consideration. Animated displacement maps see the mapped layer at its source – in other words it ignores masks, effects and keyframes. So how can we use an animated layer as a displacement map? Simple, precompose the layer. This takes all of the masks, effects, and keyframes and places them in a different composition so that when the precomposed layer is used as the displacement map, the effect is looking only at a source layer. The other thing to keep in mind is you can get strange results if the layer being displaced (the source layer) has other effects, keyframes, or even is a different size than the composition or the Displacement Map layer. To solve this, again, it is a good idea to precompose the layer first. With a better understanding of how displacement mapping works, let’s go ahead and create our own Bat Signal animation. Note: Even though this tutorial works in After Effects 5.0 and 5.5, I’ll be using After Effects 6.0 for this exercise.
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