Heat Haze

One of the goals of my thesis is to stay true to my upbringing as a video gamer, in turn the majority of my piece will use technology present in the current generation of video games.

I know I will have a few shots involving steam and wanted to make sure the heat haze distortion is present as well. du/dv maps are used in video games to distort pixels in real time, these are very similar to normal maps. Unfortunately maya has no method of implementing du/dv maps. Keeping with the texture map methodology I've made a refractive map and plugged it into the refractive index of a blinn.

Here is the texture map I used for this test, I'll be experimenting more with these maps to achieve a more stylized effect for the final piece. I'm considering using this method to create a sort of motion wake, instead of motion blur in a couple of shots, where my characters movement would lead a trail of distortion lingering for a moment.