Don’t think you could accomplish it with card dance, but you should be able to accomplish that with Shatter, using a gradient layer to control the AE’s shatter. You could even make a custom shatter map to absolutely control how the transformer breaks up. Then you would just have to precomp your shatter animation and time remap it backwards.
Here’s a pretty good tutorial on the basics of shatter.
Also Element from video copilot looks like it could be up to the task also. But it requires a little more prep work in a 3D program, check out this tutorial at 20:00.
Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com
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—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.