• Adobe After Effects Expressions

  Opacity setting for Shatter pieces

  Posted by Pepe Barton on December 27, 2009 at 7:48 pm

  I’m trying to figure out a way to make the pieces created by the Shatter effect to disappear once they reach the 90 degree angle. I’ve searched a few opacity expressions, but frankly I don’t know if I’m putting them in the right spots.

  Michael Szalapski replied 16 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Michael Szalapski

  December 28, 2009 at 10:06 pm

  As far as I know, you can’t change the opacity of individual pieces in Shatter.
  If your effect is using a custom shatter map, you could create a composition based on it with each piece white (we’ll call this precomp Opacity_Map).
  Use the Opacity_Map precomp (as a track matte) to control the opacity of your layer that you want to shatter.
  Precompose the Opacity_Map and your layer (we’ll call this new precomp Shatterable).
  Apply your shatter effect to the Shatterable precomp.
  Then in your Opacity_Map precomp you can animate the pieces from white to black.

  It’s not perfect, it will take a while to set up and it’s certainly not automated, but at least you can make your pieces dissappear.

  Just out of curiousity, why do you want to do this? Perhaps someone may have an alternate effect you might try.

  – The Great Szalam
  (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

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