Today we looked at displacement maps. To do this, we decided to create a swimming pool. We wanted to create a room with a swimming pool in it with the water flowing around the pool.
The first thing we had to do was create the room. To do this, the first thing we had to do was create the walls, floor and ceiling as separate images so we could put them together to make a room. We downloaded some textures and edited them in photoshop to make the walls the sizes and shapes we wanted. It was important to remember the size of all the walls so we could put them together in after effects afterwards.
Here are the textures we created.
These are the main textures for the room. We put the pieces together added some lights and animated a camera around the space.
The next thing to do was create the water. We did this by creating another solid, the same size and position of the floor of the swimming pool. We raised it up slightly to become the water level. We then added a fractal to this solid the same way as we created the background in a previous lesson. To animate it, we added the simple expression “time*300″ to the evolution property.
We fiddled with the parameters until it looked like rippling water. Next we precomposed this layer, took it out of the room composition and added it to the main composition. We then added an adjustment layer and applied a Displacement Map to it. We used the water comp as the displacement layer and adjusted the settings to come up with this. We also lowered the opacity of the original water comp to around 20%.
