How can I make a heat distortion effect, like you might see around the exhaust of a jet engine?
1 Answer
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:
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1$\begingroup$ Old tutorial fromblender guru. blenderguru.com/tutorials/how-to-create-heat-distortion/… $\endgroup$– VaderNov 1, 2014 at 2:16
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1$\begingroup$ There is also one over at blendercookie. cgcookie.com/blender/2014/04/03/… $\endgroup$– iKlsRNov 1, 2014 at 20:37
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