RE:MAP TUTORIALS

Part 1: Distort

This page describes how to use RE:Map Distort. If you are interested in UV Mapping and Displacement Mapping or Planar Mapping, see their respective ReadMe html files in this directory.

In After Effects, open REMAP_1_Distort.aep. The tutorial projects are made in AE 5.0 for maximum compatibility. This tool works fine in 8 bit per channels.

For non AE users, there is a screen snapshot (UI snapshot link) for you to view the settings at each stage. Just retyped the same values as shown. All projects reference the same smallTestMovie.mov which you will find in the ExampleMoviesAndImages directory. The last example uses DistortAltSource.mov as an alternate source to make the distortion map.

This complements the documentation which describes in detail each controls. The documentation PDF file is included in the installer.

Below we show different settings applied to the same footage to walk you through all the controls.

| Project: Distort 1 - UI snapshot Things to try: * Set the MipMap mode (the filtering smoothness) which is at “Medium” to “Standard”. * Play with “Make Map Softness” in the Displacement Controls. In AE twirl open the slider to move it very slowly. * Turn “Hold Edges” off (in the Render Group): See how some frame edge pixels are pulled in
| Project: Distort 2 - UI snapshot Things to try: * In the Displacement Controls, reset “Make Map Intensity” to 1.0, see the ghosting. Ok put it back to 0.3 * Twirl open the “Warp Amount” slider and move it slightly up and down. As you can see each image has a natural limit in terms of how you can push it. Ok come back to -0.3 * Switch “Warp Mode” from “Inverse” to “Forward”, different right?
| Project: Distort 3 - UI snapshot Things to try: * Set the Display to 200% so you really see * Set Sharpness (in Render Settings) to Ignore and Mip-Map to Standard then Mip-Map to Smoothest, then reset Sharpness. * Reset Mip-Map to Standard, Set to Forward Warp, Set Warp Quality to “Best” * Now set “Passes” to 1.5
| Project: Distort 4 - UI snapshot Things to try: * Note we are now in “Smear” Warp Mode and the number of “Passes” is 8. * Try 4 passes, 2 passes. * Move slowly “Scale X” to -1.0 and now play with Rotate In “Displacement Controls” which is at 92.7 degrees to start. Yes some configurations get pretty abstract.
| Project: Distort 5 - UI snapshot Things to try: * Note we are now using the ALT Displace Source which comes from the movie DistortAltSource.mov. For demo purpose we just animated a soften brush that we roughly keyframed to follow the face. So now instead of finding features in the source image, we look for the luminance slope in the ALT Displace source as to give some ring effect around our actor. * To try something different, simply make a circular ramp which is white in the center and fades to black as it goes to the frame edges. The important thing is to have greyscale images that have smooth gradients.