Make sure your shader is scaling the raw values properly. Multiply your colors by 2 then subtract 1 will move them from 0-1 to -1 - +1. So painting with 127 (or 0.5) will be 0 offset. 0 will be -1 offset and 1 will be +1 (or subtract 1 and multiply by 2. A constant bias scale node is what you need. Bias of -1 scale of 2.)
Edit: no don't plug it into the coordinate node.. Just multiply a time factor (representing how fast the flow is going) by the R and G channels of your flow map, then add that multiplied 2 vector to a texcoords node, then plug that into the uv's of your texture. and for what its worth I'm getting some really harsh…
That's because you've set up your material to only work that way. Doing something like subtracting 1 from a colour channel will give you a range of -0.5 to 0.5, which gives you bidirectional panning if you need it. Makes your flow maps harder to author though. It can be. I've seen a lot of people us vector field tools for…
Here's a really simple example I've made showing how you can use vertex colour to achieve this kind of thing. vertexColourDistort090512 by sprunghunt, on Flickr Obviously using both red and green channels the complexity is higher. From this I can see that there are two downsides to using vertex colour. 1) Even a fairly…
.. the pixels you're moving are indicative of 2d vectors. Each has a r and a G component. or if you prefer an X and Y. The value of 0 is still 0 the value of 255 (or all 8 bits with 1's in them) is 1. What these maps are doing is telling the texture fetcher to pull the pixel from your texture that is at coordinate R,G in…
As promised, here are some of my initial tests utilizing flow maps for VFX. While the basic premise is the same, using this on particles has its own advantages. Mainly since particles typically have fixed lifetimes, I don't have to worry about blending various states. Flow increases over time, then the particle dies. We…
Ok, first things first! There is such a thing as a TC_VectorDisplacementmap compression setting! Holy crap! Totally missed this one. It must have been implemented in the last year or so. The reason why it is not being distorted properly is because you need to uncheck sRGB and set the UnpackMin values to -1. That would be…