how to make realistic engine glow/heatwave exhaust effect,for spaceship???
(Blender v2.49b/Blender 2.54beta)
i need this information for my sci-fi project… 
I looked into this a while back. The common answer I found on this forum board and Google all suggest the Displace node during composting. I played with that some and it definitely looks the way to go. I didn’t finalize how though so I can’t say much more then that. Search these forums though there is more detail on the matter, but the downloads and links associated with the posts are all dead.
What I did was use a particle system rendered with billboards. Then I mapped a radial blend as a stencil followed by clouds that where black and white. Put this on a separate render layer and feed that output to the Displace vector connection of the node and render the original render layer as the input to the Image connection of the node. Outept that to the composite and you’re pretty close.
Here’s a snapshot of it w/o the stencil. The stencil would kill the blocky edges. Then adjust the size of the clouds to get the distortion that you want.
As I said, I didn’t completely finish this, but you can see the effect starting to take form… it also doesn’t address the glow yet.
