crumble effect

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Definitely achievable with Shatter or even Particle Playground. With Shatter, gravity and strength and direction are crucial. What issues/results are you having with Shatter?

Cheers
RoRK

broadcastGEMs – AEPro Volume 02 (Professional Adobe After Effects Project Files – Now Available)

[Jeff Zimmerman]

Using the shatter effect i set the repetitions very high to make the pieces falling off very small. Set the direction to 180 strength to .25 so the letters fall apart slowly, gravity high so the pieces fall downward and extrusion low so they dont seem to fall outward before going downward. I used a duplicate copy of the text with a gradient vertically from white to black and animated the threshold value hoping to make the shatter slowing advance downward. The problem is i cant seem to get this to work. The entire text is shattering at once rather than looking like its falling apart from top to bottom. Im not sure if i am using a wrong setting or just over looking something.. suggestions?

[David Bogie]

[Jeff Zimmerman] ” used a duplicate copy of the text with a gradient vertically from white to black and animated the threshold value hoping to make the shatter slowing advance downward. The problem is i cant seem to get this to work. The entire text is shattering at once rather than looking like its falling apart from top to bottom. Im not sure if i am using a wrong setting or just over looking something.. suggestions?”

Shatter is remarkably complex. You want to keyframe the diameter of the force sphere to control which particles are allowed to start moving. You can only use a gradient to control thins if you REALLY understand how shatter works. The more slowly the edge of the sphere moves across your layer, the cooler the disintegration effect will be. You might want to set the center of the sphere way above the layer. The depth of the sphere imparts implosive or explosive momentum to the particles. A sphere that is behind the layer will push particle outward toward the camera. if the sphere is on top of the layer, the particles will start to move to the back, away from the camera.

Brian Maffitt used to say this: The force field tells a particle it can move if it gets permission, the gradient gives the permission. If you’re not using gradients, permission to move is given by the sphere.

You can also use both spheres to cause a secondary ripple to pass through your particles or you can use two copies of Shatter on the same layer.

bogiesan

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

[Jeff Zimmerman] “I used a duplicate copy of the text with a gradient vertically from white to black and animated the threshold value hoping to make the shatter slowing advance downward. The problem is i cant seem to get this to work.”

Depending on how you’ve set up your gradient it could be the cause for the issue. If your text within the gradient is full-on white then the text area will shatter singly instead of top down.

Try it with a simple gradient, top-down, black to white. Leaving Gravity at default should be fine for most cases.

TIP – set repetitions to a low value while setting up the effect so that you get much faster previews.

Cheers
RoRK

broadcastGEMs – AEPro Volume 02 (Professional Adobe After Effects Project Files – Now Available)

[David Bogie]

[Roland R. Kahlenberg] “Try it with a simple gradient, top-down, black to white. Leaving Gravity at default should be fine for most cases. “

Using a gradient needlessly complicates a simple application of Shatter, especially in this instance.

bogiesan