How to make a heat distortion effect?

Question

How can I make a heat distortion effect, like you might see around the exhaust of a jet engine?

$\begingroup$ I think this was the 5000th question :D $\endgroup$
– gandalf3 ♦
Oct 29, 2014 at 22:41 — gandalf3, Oct 29, 2014 at 22:41

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-13 12:57:39Z

24

Simulation

Unfortunately since it's not yet possible to vary the IOR inside an object, it can't be simulated completely.

However, you can at least use a smoke simulation to distort things based on simulated airflow.

Create a fire simulation where the hot air should be. It doesn't have to be very high resolution:
Move the domain to an empty layer (e.g. layer 2), then setup a material for it with some random noise:

This will result in something like this, which we can use to distort the rest of the scene:
Create a new renderlayer and set it to mask the layer the main scene. Also set the main scene renderlayer to exclude the smoke:

Note that I set the number of samples taken for the smoke render layer to 1, and disabled the main passes (using only the emission pass).
Then setup the composite nodes:

Result:

edited Apr 13, 2017 at 12:57

CommunityBot

1

answered Oct 28, 2014 at 17:38

gandalf3♦

156k58 gold badges590 silver badges1128 bronze badges

1

$\begingroup$ Old tutorial fromblender guru. blenderguru.com/tutorials/how-to-create-heat-distortion/… $\endgroup$
– Vader
Nov 1, 2014 at 2:16
1

$\begingroup$ There is also one over at blendercookie. cgcookie.com/blender/2014/04/03/… $\endgroup$
– iKlsR
Nov 1, 2014 at 20:37
2

$\begingroup$ Whoop whoop! Hooray, 100k 🎉 $\endgroup$
– p2or
Jul 19, 2017 at 16:41

Add a comment |