Rippling 3D Animated Background
March 5th, 2009 by Rob Strobbe | Filed under Tutorials.Compositing
Rippling: Check. Animated: Check: 3D…. Well, not really.
Our rippling animated gradient is just hiding that color we added. How do we get these two to work together? Compositing! Click the Compositing Mode button for the first track and select Custom. Vegas presents you with the Plug-In Chooser window. Select Sony Bump Map and click OK. You’ll immediately see a profound change in your preview window. Vegas has taken the luminance values (black, white, and grays) of the noise texture and used them to shape the solid color below. Pretty neat, hey? You can experiment with the settings, but I’m going to leave them at the default and close the Track Composite Mode window.
Let’s see how it plays. Make a selection of the entire video, make sure that Loop Playback is enabled (hit Ctrl+Shift+L or the Loop Playback button below the timeline) and then hit the Play button. If you used the default length for your events, this will last 10 seconds. And…hm. Doesn’t loop very well, does it? Gets to the end and, when it returns to the beginning, the rippling changes abruptly.
Tags: background, bump map, compositing, generated media, transitions


Yes, excellent tutorial… for some reason when I do the right click procedure… shuffle events is greyed out!
(using Vegas Pro 10.0b x64)
Sorry for the very late response. I try to answer all questions, but somehow missed this one. At any rate, in case you never figured this out or just for anyone else who wants to know…
Make that you’re hovering over the second event to shuffle when you release the right mouse button. If you’re hovering over an empty area of a track or over the event you started with, Shuffle Events will be grayed out because Vegas doesn’t know which other event to shuffle. (Events don’t necessarily have to be adjacent to bet swapped.)