Multiple falling objects

[Aanarav Sareen]

To do this, I usually place an arrow on each layer and then duplicate the layer and adjust its location in the timeline randomly. But, this depends how many arrows you want. If you want a lot of arrows, then the procedure will differ.

Aanarav Sareen, ACE
Adobe Certified Expert, Premiere Pro

[Mike Clasby]

Here’s what I’d do.

Click on Dan Ebbert’s head at the top of the page:
(Welcome to the world of EXPRESSIONS)

Scroll down to Building a 3D Particle Generator

Download the aep, and read the section “more particle fun” (2/3 down the page).

Open the aep, open the comp “snow”… falling snowflakes.

Dan’s particles are 128×128 psd files but you can use almost anything. I made a quick arrow with the pen tool on a red Solid in it’s own comp.

Select all the snow psd’s and then take your arrow (a comp like above, a psd, a jpeg, etc0) from the project window and Alt+drag it onto the selected snow layers. You should have a screen of falling arrows, all a bit different.

If you don’t like all the variations of rotation, select on of your new arrow layers, “EE” reveals all the expressions in the layer, click on the “=” (equal signs)
for rotation and orientation, this will deactivate those expressions, and your arrows will be pointing in the direction they were created.

Hey, what about all those other arrows that are wrong/ Select and Delete them.

Now duplicate (Ctrl D) your only (and fixed) arrow layer as many times as you want arrows (thousands if you want, or until your machine chokes on arrows).

For other tweaking, read Dan excellent tuts.

You could do this with other Particle Systems, but this is a sweet solution for when you need some particle to do what Dan’s comps do. And it’s real 3D so you could fly a camera through your raining arrow storm.

Good luck.

[Martin Banks]

excellent, I haven’t tried it yet, but thank you for helping me, it sounds like what I’m looking for! I’ll let you know how it goes.
Cheers!
Martin