You're Using Displacement Maps Wrong - After Effects

[Music] you know what's going on guys I'm Mike from Oh box and I have to admit I've been using displacement maps in the wrong way this whole time two things one I didn't even actually know how they worked properly and two I was not using them in ways that I totally could have that would have saved me tons of time so let's jump in after-effects here and take a look at first of all how they work and second of all some cool things you could use with them so here we are in our first example we have kind of two layers I've got one titled displacement map and then I have one that's a copy just so we can kind of see both at the same time and I'm just going to make the first displacement map invisible you see here I also have an adjustment layer and then I my background layer if I search in my effects and presets for displacement map and drag it on to my adjustment layer and I set the map layer to displacement map and select effects and masks just so you know I do have a few effects on this layer so I want to make sure I select effects and masks change these both to luminance set the vertical displacement to 0 and then I cranked up the horizontal displacement you'll see exactly where my pitfall was so my interpretation of displacement maps was either kind of the lighter the displacement map was the more displacement or vice versa so going from black to white I was expecting it to be displaced over here a lot more than it was over here but as it turns out you could tell that actually 50% gray leads to no displacement and the darker you get the more it displaces in one direction and the letter you get the more it displaces in the opposite direction you can see here when I move this toggle the darker something is the more it displaces in the negative direction and the lighter it is the more in the positive direction now that may not seem like a really big impactful thing and for most applications it's not however when I saw this on Twitter this is all done with displacement maps and if you start with a black or white layer on your displacement you're really not going to be able to achieve this look very simply so let's go to example 2 where basically this is where I was practicing how to replicate that because I was so interested in how that displacement map was used that I had to figure it out for myself in this composition you see kind of this ball fall down and hit the water and have this ripple effect now I made it tutorial in the past where I show you how to do this by hand with kind of path morphing and it took absolutely forever but in this example you get a really organic looking wave effect and it's all based on this displacement map so why does knowing gray leads to zero displacement why is that important it's important because in this example I need my waterline to stay consistent and if it wasn't set to gray this line would be shifted either downward upward to the left or to the right depending on the color another cool thing with using displacement maps in this way if I double click my displacement map I actually have two of these expanding circles except for one of my expanding circles is off centered and with that led to was a wave that wasn't uniform all the way across and it made it look just a little bit more natural and realistic because a normal wave wouldn't be absolutely perfect but if I did want it to be perfect and I lined them both then you would see here that it is a perfect wave and that you know could be what you're looking for but I just thought it looked interesting being a little bit off so this is a completely new way for me to think about displacement maps one knowing now how the greatest placement map works but also these new ways to use displacement maps so let me show you two more examples of interesting ways to use displacement maps that have been talked about or discussed or discovered upwards of eight to ten years ago so these aren't new ideas with displacement maps but if you're new to After Effects and you're new to using displacement maps I figured we can talk about those so okay so the first one is portrait so in this example I have this kid he's sitting up against a wall and when I hit play you could see that there's a little bit of 3d motion here going on in the image so you could see his his his face is kind of morphing and this is not a 3d 3d layer when I move it really fast it actually looks pretty bad so if I turn on the displacement map you could actually see what we did here in Photoshop we basically highlighted parts of his face that we wanted to be closer to the camera so we did that in white and then we made his torso that mid gray tone because we wanted it to move the absolute least or basically nothing and so you can see here that when we use displacement map with something like this you can create kind of fake 3d now you don't want to go overboard there's a tons tons of tutorials online about how to do this step by step and maybe I'll link a few but if you make this go too much it things get a little a little crazy but that actually looks kind of cool actually the last one we'll talk about is a waving flag this is super common so all I have here is a flag layer let me turn off the displacement it's just a flag layer nothing and nothing crazy about it we're not looking at 3d layers here we just have a displacement and on the displacement I have it set to hard light on that master layer but let me go set that to to normal and then increase the opacity and you could just see that pretty much what we have here is a 2d video of a flag waving and when I set this to hard light and then I hit T on the keyboard and reduce the transparency we can get some of the shadows from the original well also with a displacement map layer set to the purple fabric well it's gray fabric because I put a tint on it as well as effects and masks because we want that tint set to luminance with some horizontal and vertical displacement again you don't want to go overboard you want it to be fairly subtle and you can easily create a waving flag in after-effects with just a couple 2d layers in a video so I hope you learned something new here about displacement maps at the very least I hope you learned something here about how grey is the neutral zero displacement in black and white I've been using displacement maps all wrong this entire time and having this as a base is gonna help me get to my end result a lot quicker in the past there was a lot of trial and error and I didn't really know why things weren't working the way I wanted them to work but so anyways guys if you want to download this project file please be sure to check out our patreon the only one I cannot include is this flag-waving because this video here that I used is not royalty-free so pretty much if you need a flag waving you're gonna have to probably go find that video somewhere this one was from story blocks calm but there's tons of other ones online so anyways guys thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: MOBOX Graphics

Views: 98,954

Keywords: mobox, after effects, tutorial, vfx, motion graphics, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, adobe after effects, adobe, after, effects, mograph, graphics, motion, instruction, tut, how to, help, vfx tutorial, displacement map, after effects displacement map, faux 3d, 2.5d animation, 2.5d face animation, flag wave after effects, how to use displacement maps, You're Using Displacement Maps Wrong, map, ae

Id: XNHl5Dbw3Mw

Length: 7min 27sec (447 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/dethleffs]

Am I now