Make Paper Blow Away

[Ian Corey]

Easy. Go to art school. Learn to animate.

[Michael Benton]

OK, but is there a way to simulate this, maybe not as natural looking, even a bit mechanical in AE? I’m sure its been done before.

[Ian Corey]

Dude, you’re going to have to give up some more details if you want this string to bring you ideas. We have no idea what the logo looks like:

Are the papers lined up in a grid?
Are they stacked?
Straight? Messy?
A clean edge silhouette?
Negative space showing a shape of papers?
Do they blow away and curl like natural?

We have no clue what you are looking at. How are we going to help you?

[Darby Edelen]

Depending on the number of pieces of paper you could either keyframe them by hand or try using shatter or a particle system. Shatter gives a pretty decent simulation of the physics of a plane of glass breaking, I’m not sure whether it will allow for the paper to ‘blow away’ afterward. A particle system (I recommend Trapcode Particular), on the other hand, would allow you to relatively easily animate the blowing away of the paper.

Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA

[Rhett Robinson]

Perhaps something from Dan? This is a link to make confetti, which may get your mind moving

https://www.motionscript.com/expressions-lab-ae65/confetti.html

I haven’t done any tests, but I think you could actually substitute your own “particle” in place of a standard solid…

[David Bogie]

[Mike Benton] “A client has a logo that has little peices of paper above the name of the business. He wants the peices of paper to tumble, or blow our from behind the logo and then blow away.
How do I animate the peices of paper to appear as if they’re blowing away?
Thanks in advance! “

Sort of depends on how many pieces there are and if they have to do anything else like being torn apart. Forget the tear apart, that’s just not practical in AE.

If you have only a few, less than ten, pieces, you can apply CC Cylinder or CC Sphere to each. If the paper has different pattern on the other side, this enhances the effect, but you must learn much more about these filters to use them to combine two separate layers and then tell them to render both inside and outside layers. This is really tricky and will require lots of experimentation to get the scale and layer sizes workable. Lots of play time. And it’s really confusing, you’ve been warned, but it’s really fun.

You then animate the sphere or cylinder to appear to have some wind-based ballistics. I have used this technique on falling leaves, it’s lovely. But it’s only practical on a reasonable number of layers. You can invert or scale or colorize copies of an original to reduce the hassle and you can use expressions to alter the ballistics of a master layer.

Shatter is probably your easiest route but it ain’t easy, either.
bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”