After thoroughly searching the forums, it seems that common solutions to creating desert heat atmospheric effects involves using raytracing. However, surely, there is a way to do this in post with nodes. I am needing this effect to be animated, so resources are somewhat of an issue, and extra raytracing is out of the question. Anyone know of some good techniques for this with nodes?
General information is great, a tute would be even better. Thanks in advance
nice. Quite possibly exactly what I was looking for. I’m going to get to it. Though I notice that there is no options for z buffers. I was hoping to be able to only distort far distances, is this still possible (I am just now reading into it so forgive me for asking stupid questions).
Sure. you would scale and invert the Z as an input to the X &Y scale, so that near objects would have like a 4 value, and far away would be 0 value. Use the Map Value node with a negative offset for this purpose.
you could also use render layers and apply the heat distorsion effects of the ‘background-render-layers’ but PapaSmurf’s solution is the best (one more node only)