So I needed some heat wave effects for a model I’m making for an animation, and I did try using the warp.dll tool, but it had some wierd effects, namely randome spots that were really bright or really dark around the edges of the duplis…
Now on top of this, all the heat wave tuts I found here are horrible out of date…
With this in mind, does anybody know a good way to make simulated heat wave effects? a new tut would be absolutely great, or maybe an updated version of warp.dll?
a plane in front of the camera with an alpha of zero, RayTransp turned on, IOR greater than 1, and an animated stucci texture mapped to NOR [turn up the nor slider on the same panel]
[It’s not trivial to make it so your plane doesn’t cover the entire screen and lines up with what’s behind]]
the problem is I wanted to use particles and halos that would also be affected by the heat wave, and you can’t see halos through ray transparency… 
so then you want to do the same thing in a post-process…
oh!!! … okay, this will be somewhat wonky [but I know it can be done]
download the gimp and the gimp animation package
render your animation without heat waves
look up the displace filter in the gimp… You want to specify the x and y offset seperately… [which means rendering two more seperate animations, both showing more white for more offset in a particular direction [it’s useful to map textures using normals for this]]…
[and I’m not sure if applying the filter to one sequence will advance the other two]
… so it’d probably be easier to find a version of blender where the warp plugin works.
yea… after messing around with the warp plugin and particles and a mesh with an animated texture (I used a mesh rather than a plane because I wanted it to form to my main object), I got a much better looking effect with the warp plugin, but the setting had to be rediculously low… like .015 ish… The only problem I came to is when I tried to do the animate thing for it, it displayed the warp plugin with a setting of 1ish which looks pretty crappy… In short, I wish the warp plugin worked better with the new blender -_-…
i dont know if this could be usefull but why dont you try recompiling it ? i really dunno if this can work.
how does one do this? o.O
anybody? :S