Particle and text fall…

[Chaz Chester]

• It would be somewhat tedious, but you could achieve this by putting your text and some colored shapes or solids in a pre-comp, adding a small circular mask to the pre-comp itself, duplicating the layer and moving the mask to reveal different parts of the pre-comp’s contents, using a script to center the anchor points on all of the layers at once, converting them all to 3D layers, and then manually animating the position and rotations.
• I’ve seen people use scripts to create particle simulations, so there might be someone out there who could write one for this.
• It wouldn’t look the same, but you could achieve something similar to this by using the Shatter effect and reversing the result.
• Most 3D software, like Cinema 4D, would allow you to easily simulate falling circles like this.

[John Williams]

Hi there. I’d certainly agree with Chaz. This is almost definitely best done in Cinema 4D but unfortunately the Lite version that comes with After Effects won’t give you the particles and gravity dynamics, however, the good news is you can just download the 14 day trial;)

There’s loads of tutorials how to get it going in that, Greyscale Gorilla is a top site for Cinema4D.

Hope that helps if you choose to go that route, it’s the future for motion graphics;)

John Williams

Soho Editors

[Kiven Nekek]

help guys i try to make this animation