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Animating ~1000 photos falling into a shape
Hi,
First of all, I have googled around for this issue and I have found very little relevant info, which is somewhat surprising.
I need to animate about a thousand photos falling in 3D space from behind the camera onto a surface and to form a final shape, while the camera dollies back to reveal the shape and the falling intensifies/speeds up. The photos’ positions and rotations can be somewhat random to create a chaotic look. Some of them have to be a bit more prominent than others in their fly-by. The whole thing should last about 1m30s.
Now, obviously, manually animating this seems like a bit of a hassle, I do have the time for it, but it just seems like a really inefficient solution to a problem that can probably be solved procedurally with expressions or plugins.
What I’ve tried so far is having 50 or so photos fall in manually (which presents a problem with replacing the placeholders one-by-one) and do the rest with Card Dance, however they don’t mix very well, and Card Dance can’t do them falling and stopping one-by-one at a consistent speed, since you can only animate all of the cards at the same time, so it doesn’t seem like a solution.
I’ve also tried having 2 Card Dance layers, one for the falling part which just moves and one for the impact with the floor, but there seems to be no way to hide the cards once they reach the floor threshold, and in general, it seems like a janky and non flexible way of doing things, and it doesn’t look good with the long-ish duration of the composition.
I have also tried messing around with Particular and Element 3D, but I haven’t been able to stop the particles in such a way that they face the camera with Particular, and importing 1000 images as textures for 1000 planes into Element seems to be an even larger undertaking than animating them manually.
So, my question is, does anybody know of any techniques, expressions or plugins that could help me solve this? I’d rather explore more options before opting to just bite the bullet and mind-numbingly do it by hand.
I’d be happy to clarify if anything doesn’t make sense.
Thanks.
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6 Replies
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[Anatoly Volnov] “I have also tried messing around with Particular and Element 3D, but I haven’t been able to stop the particles in such a way that they face the camera with Particular,”
To do this in Particular, build the animation backwards. Emit at the settled position, use the options available to you to add movement and a little chaos, then precomp and time-reverse.
You might also try Trapcode Form, which is a particle array system rather than a particle emission system.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Anatoly –
This plugin might help you out, if you don’t own Particular:
https://aescripts.com/pastiche/
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Joe, Pastiche looks really promising! Thanks for the tip.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “To do this in Particular, build the animation backwards”
This is so great and obvious that I feel dumb for forgetting to think about it, thank you! It should work.
[Joseph W. Bourke] “This plugin might help you out”
This plugin also looks perfect, I’ll check it out, thanks!
I’ll report back on this project once it’s done and describe the way I did it for future searches.
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The project ended up getting scrapped because of unrelated reasons, but I did finish the animation I was making.
For future searchers, I ended up using Pastiche to distribute the layers and animate from a larger shape into a heart, then making the layers 3D and moving the first keyframe to a position behind the camera. Then I used Beat Asssitant to stagger them in time to the beat.
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Thanks for sharing your final solution with the forum! I’m sure this will be helpful to future readers, and I hope this will encourage other posters to share their final solutions, too.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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