Gravity Expression

[Dan Ebberts]

If you add a Position animator (and maybe Rotation as well), with an expression for the Amount property of an Expression Selector, you could use textIndex as a random seed to apply different physics to each character.

You’d need a pretty good definition of the allowable range and type of motion before you got too far along though.

Dan

[Kevin Camp]

you might try the shatter effect, using the text as a custom shatter map…. it will allow you to animate a force that will send the letters flying.

the issue with poor edge quality can usually be solved with motion blur, or creating a much larger than needed shatter map and scaling it down.

if you haven’t used shatter before, you’ll probably want to search for a tutorial or two… there is an old one here (search the cow ae tutorials) for creating 3d text using shatter. it’s not quite what you’re after, but it will cover many of the aspects that you’ll need.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Darby Edelen]

I like Dan’s solution. Let’s face it, I like text animators.

For the ‘gravity’ component of the animations you could create a single expression selector, as Dan suggests, and then apply an expression to (or just keyframe) the position property of the animator to increase in the Y-value (move down the screen as though influenced by gravity). With a random selection based on the expression selector (or even a static wiggle selector) each letter would have it’s own unique downward acceleration (although really they should be close to the same).

Then you can use different animators to animate the ‘flick.’ The animators can work on top of one another so you could separate out the different physical actions into different animators and have finer control.

Darby Edelen