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Controlling the ‘Shatter’ effect in AE (animation)
The shatter effect is great, it’s just what I need, but I want to use is as a transition and at the moment when I apply it to the piece of footage I want to use it on it starts animating from the very first frame.
Now I’ve played around with the settings to see what controls the animation and it seems setting ‘Force 1> Strength’ to 0 and ‘Physics> Gravity’ to 0 completely stops it. If you set the strength to 0 and leave gravity alone, the image wont ‘shatter’ but will fall of the screen.
Problem being if you keyframe the strength & gravity to 0, then move a frame down and reset them, only the gravity returns and the strength no longer controls the ‘shatter’ and it literally just doesn’t shatter.
Once I’d found what I thought was controlling the shatter I thought great, keyframe when I want it to shatter, move back a few frames and set those 2 settings to 0 but that doesn’t work for the ‘shatter’, just the gravity.
Is it a little broken or am I looking at it the wrong way for the effect I want to achieve? Any help appreciated.
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6 Replies
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It wasn’t ‘influence sphere’ per say but thinking of sphere led me to radius, it would appear radius (under ‘Force 1’) is the primary control for the shatter and keyframing that value let’s you put the shatter at any point in time.
Sometimes there’s just so many options to look at you just don’t think some of them apply to what you’re after, just takes someone else’s guidance sometimes, so thanks for putting me onto the right track 🙂
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you might take a look at this tutorial, it’s a pretty good (though old) introduction to shatter:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/unguren_ben/shatter.php
and it goes through using gradients to control shatter, which is often easier.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Here is something that you could try. Go to Layer > New > Adjustment layer. Click and drag this layer to where you want your Shatter to begin. Drag it from the middle, not the end which just changes the length. Drag your shatter effect on to the adjustment layer, itself. Not the preview screen. That’s it!
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You can animate the force radius (and position, btw) to control the shatter.
You can use a gradient to control it.
And, to add a third option, you can split your layer (put your current time indicator where you want the transition to begin and press ctrl+d on the PC or cmd+d on a Mac) and apply Shatter to the later layer.
Many ways to skin the cat.– 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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Thankfully just playing with the radius gives me the transition/effect I was looking for but as per usual with AE there are ‘many ways to skin the cat’ as Michael puts it so although I’ve achieved what I was after I will no doubt be fiddling with all the other methods for the sake of it, part of the reason I enjoy tinkering around with AE and why I posted this in the basics (beginners) section of the forum really.
Thanks for your input guys 🙂
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There are several resources, including tutorials, for using the Shatter effect here.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
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