I do a lot of automation, but don’t know anything about displacement maps. What steps would you do to accomplish it manually?
Peace,
Tony
Tony,
First I’d take the original image. For the sake of argument let’s say it’s an image of a pipe. Then I’d go into Filter/Distort/Displace and select a frame that I rendered on a 3d rendering program (3DS Max 5.1) of a greyscaled particles. If the background color of this frame is greay (128), then the effect you get is a distorting effect like you’d see if you were looking through a hot vapor.
I’d save that combined/displaced image under another name. Then reload the original pipe image and repeat using the next frame of greyscaled particles until done.
Thanks!
That’s a stumper! I have no idea how to automate that. The displacement file name is embedded in the action so in order to record it, you’d have to go through all 100 or so displacement maps.
The only thing you can do is automate the part that does Filter|Distort|Displace – but you have to "man" it. If you toggle the dialog box to ON, you can simply pick filename after filename.
What I mean is, you record the action to do one and assign it a hotkey. Then toggle the dialog of the action to on. When you press the hotkey you are presented with a "choose displacement map" dialog box, whereby you’d have to select them one at a time, and keep pressing that hotkey for each subsequent displacement map.
Maybe someone can come up with another way, but I can’t think of a another way – sorry.
Peace,
Tony