Heat Wave Experiment (Maya with After Effects)

This a heat wave test experiment using particles generated from Autodesk Maya and composited with Adobe After Effects.

There's been many question on how to do it, but it's actually pretty easy. You don't have to do everything in a single program. Here's how I do it.

For my case, the heat wave is generated by the thruster of the planes, so I will place an emitter on the thruster.
Set particle render type to sphere, and other attributes to your needs. Simply render it without any extra coloring, and import it to AE. Just create a "New Adjustment Layer", apply the effects "Displacement Map", attach the rendered images to the displacement map. And lastly hide the rendered images.