I've followed a neat tutorial on making a rain drop on a surface. It uses bunch of Turbulent Displacements and Particle effects to create a black and white bump map.
That map is fed into CC Glass to create refraction. I wanted to render just the black and white bump map to avoid overhead with Turbulent Displacements etc...
My problem is, that when I use a video or image sequence of a bump map, cc glass renders completely different than if I use the actual composition, created at runtime.
Check this images:
With prerender as bump map: http://imgur.com/a/WrEx9
With composition as bump map: http://imgur.com/a/gjwzj
To further prove my point, check this image of a bump map composition and bump map .mov prerender. There is 0 visual difference. And even if there are small differences, that shouldn't cause so many artifacts.
At first it looked to me that there is a lot of pixelation going on. But on further inspection I realized that center of all lines doesn't even have a refraction. Like it is cut of.
I've repeated this with openEXR image sequence and the issue remains.
Moreover, this result is different as if I choose 8 bpc color settings. If I do that all of the bump map is completely pixelated, but in my case with the prerender, only edges are maybe somewhat pixelated so that probably isn't the case.
You can download project files here: VIDEO COPILOT | After Effects Tutorials, Plug-ins and Stock Footage for Post Production Professionals
Can someone explain why is this happening? I'd love if someone can reconstruct the problem to cross me being stupid of the list.
Thanks, cheers