Hi there,
Does anyone know of a convincing way to do heat distortion from the engine of a plane. Ive tried particle flow with large partcles set to a high speed but vray motion blur just throws unhandled exceptions. I cannot use standard 3dsmax motion blur so thinking maybe that I should composite these in post.
Anyone else know of other methods to achieve this ?
what you need is particles yes. But the approach is basically, render out particles with black and white fractal on them (they can be spheres or whatever), then in composite you can use displace and pipe the particle pass into it as matte. The displace will augment the pixels of the image based on the particles black and white values. You can also apply post blur to them to soften the effect overall.
Ok, cheers for that. Will give it a go. 
That seems to work well. Thanks. The problem im having is blurring the particle layer user to displace the main image.
So i have the main image…and the particles layer. I have added a displace effect to the main image and set the particle layer as the displace layer.
When I add a blur to the particle layer it seems to ignore the effect…
I dont use aftereffects loads…
Sok, managed to work it out…i had to create another composition to be used for the particles..
Thanks for the help.
to save some space consider doing the particles right in after effects. CCparticle world can get you pretty far for most needs. It renders fast and you don’t have to use frames from Max.
Since it’s a 2D effect in the end anyway…might as well create the particles in AE to save some troubles. It might be easier to change things on the fly that way as well.
Yeah, i guess I could do that, but for this scene Im going to stick with max particles. They dont take long to render. They dont need any shadows etc. I just put the noise map into a vraylightmaterial. Renders really quick and stays fixed to the engine nicely. Also creates a nice alpha for the plane automatically.
Cheers for the help though
additionally, you can render red and green particles, and shuffle these into the U and V motion channels in your compositing app…
this also works quite nicely…