Forgive me for asking, but after doing an extensive search here and on the net, I still am wondering if a looping monochrome AVI or QT file could be used as a displacement shader for animating water, such as a stream, or river, or lava for that matter. I am still in the stage of discovery with Carrara, so I was wondering if this would be possible. Thanks, Dan

Why don't you try it and let us know? It seems theoretically possible. Don't try it on an infinite plane, though.

One issue I see is the subtlety a dismap usually has.Need to convert it right. You could end up w/ some strange results, but by all means play.I don't even know if dis channel will take a movie? Will it?

It works great.

Attached Link: Animated Displacement Map

Thank you Mark! That animation confirms that what I had in mind can be accomplished! @Patrick, You are quite right; sometimes the best way to see if something works is by just trying it. I am so new to this app though that it seems that Carrara5 is a fast, sleek exoticar, and I only have experience driving a "clunker",lol. I still have to back out of the driveway before I can take her on the AutoBahn!:laugh:

Nice Mark. How did you convert it to a dis map? Is is grayscale...then what?

Hi Ren_mem, In the displacment tab of the shader tree, you simply load in a texture except you select a movie instead of an image - Carrara will understand it as a movie and put a little movie player with it in your texture window. It doesn't absolutely have to be a Grayscale image but that is the only information that Carrara will read from it. Any colors in the file just adds to processing and rendertime. This technique is called rotoscoping. Mark

So if you do grayscale, that's it, you aren't doing any other processing? Cool. I am exploring normal and dis maps now. Lotta fun to make from your own photo textures(when they work that is )

Now that's cool. Thanks for the tips.

How did you make the displacement avi in the first place. Did you use a vid cam, paint the frames by hand or use picturs. I understand the hows on importing that avi to use in Carrara. Not the making of the imported avi.

You can create animated displacement maps like this with any pro-grade particle software (http://www.wondertouch.com/se_info.asp) Also, Kai Tools (ships with Corel Painter now) has some excellent, animatable tools that can be used to create liquids. However, for this I used Final Cut Pro's LIveType and Motion. Mark

Thanks. I have Painter and that's what I was thinking of using. Just wasn't sure. You say particle software. Couldn't you use the one that comes with Carrara? Do it all in one app kind of thingy?

Particles in Carrara are different than particles for video. Carrara' particle system is a bona fide 3D solution. You could probably come up with something to use for an animated map, but with trememndous effort. The video/2D particle solutions are a slam dunk for work like this since it is common practice to add smoke, fire or water after a video take. In the case of Painter, being able to record some of the fluid effects is truely the fastest solution. I'm not talking doing a frame by frame unless you want to. Just use a recordable filter like Fluid or Ink Dropper. No comes the fun part, adding 2D animations to 3D Carrara particals... ;)

OK. Thanks, I'll see what I can come up with today. I'll try all the options I have and see what happens.

That's very good to know! I still have a full-ver. of Wondertouch's Particle Illusion 2 LE that was given away on a cover disc of a glossy UK graphics mag a couple of years back. Now maybe I can put it to real use. Thanks for the tip.

Okay Mark, I just have to ask, if I may. What pixel dimensions and framerate did you use to make your animated displacement map? Also did you output it as QT, or AVI. Judging from your site I would suspect QT, right? Thanks, Dan

HI Danmo, Like regular textures, the pixel density should be equal to or greater than the final output size. Mine happen to be 640 x 480 pixels. However, you could get away with less since the displacement filter has a smoothing option that does a pretty good job of eliminating "jaggies". The movies can be in whatever format you codecs for. Frame rate needs to be at or above the final frame rate of your finished movie. Mark

Thank you very much Mark!  This helps me a great deal.

Mark, I have a question about the rotoscoping displacement map. I have a little quicktime move I did of some flowing water in a monochrome movie (not grayscale). Seems to have enough contrast and loads fine and plays in the window. I put that in dis channel, but unless I have the movie (color or monochrome) in the texture channel I don't get animated displacement from a render. If I use a color texture I can see some displacement, but it is static. Wondering if there are some ism's of carrara or something I should know here. btw all movies are at 30fps

Don't know how you guys feel about this, so I thought I would ask here first before I make a tutorial. I have been getting good results in generating animated grey-scale displacement maps by using Bryce. I prepare several heightmaps(8) in PS and do a top view altitude render animation in Bryce.

I just apply a new map every thirty keyframes,( frame1, frame30, frame 60,etc) by importing it as a picture height map, and setting keyframes,  The document is 1024x1024  as is the terrain. I then animate the terrain to move a bit on the Z and use a top view position and make sure the terrain completely fills the view. I then select altitude render and render the animation. 

The way Bryce smoothly "tweens", or interpolates between the different heightmaps and the motion from the moving terrain help to sell the look of moving fluid, or water. The best part is that altitude renders are fast.The average frame takes less than fifteen seconds, so a lengthy animation loop can be made in a hurry. I've even done some pretty good water animations in Bryce using this method, so I have no doubt that it would work in Carrara with all its great tools.

Please forgive me if I didn't think of an obvious way to do this in Carrara. I'm sure some of you "grizzled" vets will know of a way to do the same thing in Carrara. But I had an excuse to get some use out of an old app, and one I know pretty well.

Hi Ren_mem, I've run some color movies in the displacment channel before without any problems. However, I did create some "problem" files every once in a awhile where the displacement timeline seemed to get stuck and ignore the main timeline. So, I'd delete the movie shader used in the displacement map and then Edit>Remove Unused Shader and reimport it. Also your note about running the same movie in color channel seeming to "fix" things did jog my memory a little as something that could be done to force the displacement timeline to work again. However, it was inconsistent and I haven't had the experience lately. Sorry, not much help here... Danamo, Cool solution. I haven't played with height maps over time in Bryce, Vue or Carrara for the purpose of creating a motion height map - an excellent solution. I don't think Carrara allows you to animate height maps although. I'll have to give it a try. There just aren't enough hours in the day! :-D Once Vue came along, I quit using Bryce because it was slowly killing me with it's render times - and I mean slowly. Vue has some excellent animated terrain functions worth exploring for this purpose. Mark

I was wondering if it was something like that. I also noticed sometimes rendered qt movies don't seem to play in carrara, but directly playing the movie w/ QT works fine or even manual scrubbing. I will have to experiment further. Too much to experiment with! :biggrin: