leaves flying away

Adobe After Effects

leaves flying away

Posted by Steve Gerges on July 14, 2009 at 3:22 pm

Hi all,

i’m involved in a project that requires me to do the following:

i have a heart that is build of over 150 layers of leaves that do grow/pop up to form a heart. till there everything is fine 😉

now the client wants me to animate a football (that i’ll probably do in 3D because of some texture issues) that is hitting in the centre of the heart and makes all the leaves get kicked/fly away.

now my question: is there any way to “automatically” animate these leaves fly away and tumble/rotate (maybe expressions) cause i think it would take an incredible amount of time to animate all the leaves one by one…..

or maybe someone else has a better idea !?

my leaves are all separate compositions, and i have like 180 of them to animate….

any help is appreciated,

cheers,

Steve.

Steve – Art Director – http://www.remedia.lu

Steve Gerges replied 16 years, 10 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Jon Geddes
July 14, 2009 at 4:04 pm

With that many layers you probably should have used a particle system like Trapcode Particular or Trapcode Form which would give you easy controls over that. For best results it should probably be done in a full 3D app.

Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com
David Bogie
July 14, 2009 at 4:38 pm

Yar, sudden changes made at the whim of some overpaid art director can have ripple effects on the budget. Particular is about $400 and has a learning curve. Dozens of tutorials but you’ve still got to watch them and practice.
If this football-disruptor effect had been considered earlier in the workflow, you might have built the heart/leaves using Shatter running backwards (assuming the look and feel were acceptable). The problem with making leaves disperse in AE is they’re not curved and they don’t have back sides which makes them look fake. As long as fake leaves are acceptable, fake ballistics could be part of the stylized look and feel and you could try to sell your client on Shatter.

Umm, try to get this guy to stop being creative or, at least, be sure you have an understanding with him that changing his mind is gonna cost him some money.

bogiesan
Steve Gerges
July 16, 2009 at 6:49 am

i did try to use particular but was not satisfied with the results….
i guess i’ll have to animate all my 180 layers by hand :/ what a pain…

anyway maybe i’ll try out a shatter, lets see how that works out…

thanks for the answers anyway.

steve.

Steve – Art Director – http://www.remedia.lu

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