Destroying Text

[Steve Roberts]

None of these are included in a preset: you need to “mix your own” effect.

For burning, you can make the text shrink away by animating a mask downwards or using a comp containing a ramp layer as a gradient wipe, but as for the flame, you’d probably have to find stock footage of a flame and composite it over each letter. Ideally, you’d cut real letters out of cardboard and shoot them as they burn, I suppose.

For crumbling, you need to work with the Shatter effect. There should be a tutorial on the COW.

Dissolving …yeesh. Use the gradient wipe or mask method above and add a puddle of water by creating a puddle shaped mask, then applying bevel alpha over it, and compositing a sky image over it to act as a reflection.

Dripping: Try searching the COW for “blood”. Search the archives.

Anybody else?

[Andrei Firtich]

For destroying text you might wanna try this. Precomp a layer with some fractal noise, try using something smooth. Apply some blurr to it. Put a 50% grayscale as background. Ue a mask on the fractal noise layer. Now put some keyframes on the shape of the mask of the fractal noise. You want the fractal noise racing thru the screen from whatever direction you want the text destroyed. Then put a keyframe on the greyscale layer to got to 0 opacity once the fractal noise is gone.
Hope this helps 🙂

[Andrei Firtich]

Sorry forgot the part about applying a distor map to the text layer. Do that put distortion to luminance on both parameters, then tweak the horizontal and vertical distortion to your pleasure. Then select the layer with the fractal noise as your distort map