7 Years of Bad Luck: Making Shards of Glass with Displacement Maps
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You will need:
- AE 5.0 Production Bundle to use the zipped file, otherwise, an older version of AE will work
- Image editing software to create your shards
- Download the shards.aep file.
- Most of the time, gentle gradients and smooth fades look best when using displacement maps, but heck, why be normal.
- In Photoshop or your graphic editing software of choice, make your shard map. See the one on this page for a sample. Use a filter or draw it by hand.
- Find an image or picture to shatter. Maybe someone you don't like? (the guy in the pic, Thom, is a good friend of mine, and the only picture I could find on my machine!)
- Create a project and new comp. I made mine 320x240, 2 seconds long. We'll call it "shards".
- Import your image and your shards map you created in Photoshop.
- Drag your image and shards into your comp. Turn off the visibility of the shards layer.
- Apply the displacement map filter to the photo layer. That's Effects > Distort > Displacement map.
- Set the Displacement map layer to "shards".
- Set the Maximum horizontal and vertical values to whatever you like. The closer the number is to zero, the less distortion you'll have. I used luminance values for each, and again, use what you like. Take a look at them all, some will yield different results. Make sure "Edge Behavior" is ON.
The Final